Assisted stretching is a rapidly growing industry

Sometimes life just gives you a smack and says “listen up” so obviously that you can’t ignore her. She did this to me last Sunday.

The lesson began, inadvertently, on the previous Friday. Our 35-year-old deck was in need of serious repairs, which involved ripping off a portion of the decking planks, all of which had been installed with ardox nails. If you’re not a do-it-yourselfer, ardox nails are designed with spiraling ridges around their shaft, sort of like a lazy or sagging woodscrew might appear. The idea is that as you hammer them, they twist their way into the wood to provide a stronger connection. The downside is that they will not, without the force of Hercules, come back out. Ever.

After I smashed and pried the rotting wood off the deck, I was left with about 50 defiant three-and-a-half inch ardox nails that had been pounded firmly into the cross beams, and Hercules was nowhere in sight. Fortunately he’d left a massive, heavy-duty crow bar in his stead. Properly braced, and with all my weight applied, the crowbar seemed a match for the nails.

After bending and stretching and pulling the first half-dozen nails out, Herc’s crowbar was working, but my back felt ready to break. This is the guy that faithfully does his pull-aparts and pull-downs, extensions and suspensions, dumbbell rows and Supermans three or four times a week to maintain a strong back. By the end of the day, the nails had been vanquished and my back was stiff, but essentially okay – likely thanks to the exercise diet above.

Saturday was more, but easier, deck work, and Sunday morning I clipped into my bike pedals and cycled off toward Wainfleet.

I ride bikes that have drop handlebars, the style the Tour de France competitors ride. Old-timers refer to them as 10-speeds. They’re ridiculously uncomfortable until you get used to them. Your extended arms and locked elbows relay every jarring pothole and road imperfection straight up to your neck, and your abdominal and back muscles struggle to keep your spine from cracking as you hunch forward. The best way to ride these bikes is to bend your elbows to absorb the jarring, crouch even lower to straighten your spine, and hope your muscles can hold this pose while you pedal steadily.

My abdominals and back muscles can normally keep me in the preferred pose for about 500 metres before my back screams and surrenders, causing me to sit up and lock my elbows for support. Last Sunday I dropped into the pose, and was almost two kilometers down the road when I realized my back wasn’t complaining. A few hundred metres later I had to sit up for a while, then the same scenario repeated itself. What had happened?

I speculated that by stretching my healthy back well beyond its normal experience when pulling the nails, I had somehow freed my upper body muscle group from what my brain perceived were its normal limitations; allowing what had previously been almost impossible to happen easily. Yet most studies reviewing the benefits and harm of stretching our muscles and joints have mixed results, and all warn of the damage stretching cold muscles and adopting poor techniques can do.

If my speculation was correct, was professional opinion on stretching changing? Maybe.

A CNN.com report says assisted stretching is a rapidly growing industry. Verdine Baker, President of StretchLab, a California-based company with more than 400 studios in the United States, told CNN, “People are starting to see stretching as that modality that fits into health and wellness similar to physical therapy and chiropractic care.”

STRETCHZONE, another stretch studio franchise, states “With the help of a stretch practitioner, you can stretch farther than you could ever do on your own, especially if you have tight muscles and joints. They know how to do it without straining your muscles.”

We all know of services that have been sold or offered to consumers that under examination were of little or no value. What do disinterested third-party sources such as Harvard Health and the Cleveland Clinic have to say? Both agree that correctly done, stretching may improve joint flexibility and range of motion. Their opinions on stretch practitioners are divided.

In a report to Harvard Health, Dr. Adam Tenforde, Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School and a Sports Medicine Physician at Spaulding Rehabilitation, states, “The ‘stretch therapists’ and ‘flexologists’ at stretching studios may have certain certifications and training. But they’re probably not qualified to recognize and address health-related causes for your pain or stiffness. If you have a previous or current musculoskeletal injury, you’re much better off going to a physical therapist who has the expertise and training to treat you correctly.”

He also states bluntly that evidence is lacking to suggest that stretching helps overall health, and says that aggressive stretching can make injuries worse.

On the other hand, Exercise Specialist Ben Kuharik says in Cleveland Clinic’s online “Health Essentials” journal that “Assisted stretching is a form of passive stretching which uses an outside force, including a partner, to stretch your muscles. Assisted stretching is also known in the physical therapy space as proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretching.”

Kuharik believes that as our muscles fatigue it’s important to have a partner who will push those muscles farther than they would normally experience, resulting in a deeper stretch and after a few sessions, an improved range of motion beyond the norm that one could achieve on their own.

These and other conflicting viewpoints, and the fact that Kuharik says physical therapists are aware of and already using stretch therapies, limit definitive conclusions about the benefits of stretch practitioners.

Had I found a pseudo stretch practitioner in my crowbar and ardox nails? Although the results seemed to indicate that in this case extra stretching yielded unexpectedly positive results, checking with a health professional to learn more is recommended.