For years I thought stretching meant what most people think it means.
Find something tight. Pull on it. Hold it for thirty seconds. Hope it gets looser.
I did plenty of that.
And like a lot of people, I discovered something frustrating.
The tightness kept coming back.
That eventually led Peggy and me to resistance stretching, and it completely changed the way I thought about flexibility.
Instead of relaxing a muscle and pulling on it, you contract the muscle while you’re stretching it.
You’re strengthening and lengthening at the same time.
That sounds like a small difference.
For me, it wasn’t.
When I started doing this in 2007, I was facing a collection of possible surgeries involving my feet, knee, back, shoulder and hip. My body hurt in enough places that keeping track of them was becoming a hobby.
Contracted Stretching became a huge part of changing that.
Peggy and I eventually trained extensively in resistance stretching, and we’ve now spent years using and adapting what we learned with ours…
