Carl you post some stretches for me in a thread a few months back to help increase range of motion and movements for my backhand. With some time between now and then I Just wanted to say that the were very helpful. The pain I occasionally had is gone and the increased movement range has helped in improving my backhand play and it's consistency. I will say (do to my over eagerness) I did overdo it a bit at first. I actually strained a tendon (the one in your forearm that connects to your thumb). But after I let that rest for a few weeks and I eased back into stretching and play its been great.
Glad to hear you were ultimately able to use the stretches to help things get better. Sorry to hear that you over did it at the beginning due to overzealousness. Glad you sorted that out and aren't overdoing it anymore.
One thing people don't realize about stretching: it really should not be about pushing to a point where the stretch is painful. In some kinds of working out the phrase "No pain, No gain," applies. It does not apply with stretching. If you use stretches in a way where they are gentle enough to feel good, relaxed enough so that the muscles being stretched can relax and let go into the stretch, then it will be much more beneficial.
On the surface stretching seems like it is about pulling muscles longer. It should not be. It is more useful if it is about putting the muscles in a mildly lengthened position and letting them relax and release tension.
So a stretch that feels relaxed and good is ultimately more useful that one that feels intense to the point where it feels like torture.
The tension in the muscles is patterned into them by the nervous system. If you stretch gently and progressively deepen as your muscles relax, over minutes, your muscles will release much more tension and you will ultimately go much farther in a stretch than you would if you start off by trying to push as deep as you can into a stretch.
If you took a person who is super tight and inflexible and gave them general anesthesia for surgery, that person would be so floppy flexible that, if you had to move him from one table to another, you would need to be trained to do it so you didn't dislocate his joints and cause serious injury. So the same person who is stiff and tight, all of a sudden is very flexible when anesthesia removes the nerve impulses to the muscles!!!! Just take a few moments to really think about it before reading on.
So the actual purpose of stretching exercises is to get the nervous system to send fewer contract messages to the muscles so they can relax and lengthen. And so that the tension that is being patterned into the muscles by the nervous system can release.
By the way, this is not separate from why stretching before playing table tennis or most sports activities where muscles will engage in a way to get body parts to move fast. The messages that get the muscle to relax, let go and lengthen, are the same messages that will not want your muscles to make those fast acceleration contractions.
And because you have made the muscles more relaxed and lengthened the resting length of the muscle, you have also made those muscles more vulnerable to damage like tearing as a result of those fast acceleration contractions.
By warming up and getting more blood to the area you will use in an exercise, the area's range of motion will naturally increase to the extent it needs to for the specific action. Just by warming up and getting more blood to the area, this will happen naturally. But that version of the joint relaxing is different than how it happens from stretching.
And when you are done with the actions of a sport, while you still have that extra blood flow in the muscles you were using, that is the ideal time to stretch the muscles that get tight from playing table tennis.
Hope this information is helpful.
Sent from Deep Space by Abacus
