The older I have gotten the more my body resents me. As a result, I have been on a pretty constant journey for the past three years to get my body feeling whole.
Right as covid hit and I was working from home, I started investing an hour a day into rehabbing my body. This ended up in a lot of stretching. It definitely helped.
One thing I notice with static stretching for myself, it had a law of diminishing returns. In that, I could never get past certain thresholds of discomfort. And when I tried to push past them, I'd end up setting myself back with pain.
I had certainly been in a much better place since starting stretching. I continued my studies and even purchased a special program. Again, I'd get to a good place, but I wanted more. I wanted to be more pain-free.
Right before Christmas I was outside decorating while listening to a podcast. In it, a physical therapist was emphasizing how she was not a fan of stretching. How one would end up putting themself into positions of pain. Just constantly hitting a nerve, much like I had been doing.
She discussed the benefits of rehab movements. That got me thinking. I know a lot of the stretches that were getting me to good places. I just needed to make them better somehow.
Then it hit me, you could basically turn any stretch into a rehab-type movement by performing it in a dynamic fashion. Voila, I took many of those stretches, and instead of holding each one, I moved in and out of them.
I started feeling results the next day. I think in great part because I was no longer testing the limits of my range of motion. I'd touch on them with movement but never lean into them as I had in the past. Then incrementally I'd get further and further past that previous limit.
I have this never-ending quest to be pain-free. This may actually not even be possible given my age, injuries, and the way I like to train. But, I'm getting pretty damn close.
