Ease of Move - Train your Flexibility
Taking Stretching Seriously : Flexibility Training
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Our training "Ease of Move" emphasizes the functional aspects of fascia for flexibility, strength, and coordination. This training, inspired by Tai Chi, improves range of motion, prevents injuries, and has important systemic benefits. As it may improve blood flow, tissue waste removal, and even better breathing, it can also combat inflammation, a major contributor to aging and chronic diseases. Regular stretching either is ineffective regarding those effects and easily leads to injuries in the connective tissue. "Ease of Move" addresses the function and physiology of your moving body parts, reaching far beyond beyond simple muscle lengthening.
Everybody knows that stretching after exercise or sports activities is recommended. Yet, why should that be beneficial? I mean, why precisely? And what has stretching to do with healthy longevity, the ultimate subject at La Belle Vie?
Here we describe the main benefits of proper flexibility training as a form of its own. Flexibility training, focusing on the Ease of Moves, goes far beyond stretching and the prevention of muscular injury.
Mobility, or Ease of Move, as we understand it, is a consequence of three inseparable aspects: flexibility, strength and coordination. Flexibility training builds and maintains a proper range of motion, preventing muscular weaknesses and imbalances. Flexibility training not only counteracts the natural shortening of muscles and tendons. It also improves their structure and density by aligning them into the direction of the forces. And, as important as often neglected, fascia get strengthened and mobilized, adhesions dissolved.
Particularly the improvement of flexibility requires an extended approach. For maintaining a certain degree of flexibility, static stretching can be sufficient. For improving flexibility it is not. Ease of Move Flexibility Training is very different from the usual modes of stretching exercises. Standard stetching routines do not integrate the morphology and functional aspects or physiological dynamics of fascia. Thus, simple stretching routines often either do not provide much progress or easily lead to injuries. As a sine qua non any flexibility routine has to include training and correction of fascia as well.
Our Ease of Move Flexibility Training, being inspired by Taiji and its special emphasis on the fascia and orchestrates tension and force resembling the principles of tensegrity. Such, it is reaching far beyond the elongation of muscles, whether active or passive.
The result of adhering to a flexibility training here
at La Belle Vie is : Ease of Move
Besides the ease of movement, mobility has other aspects to it. We will briefly consider what the basic factors for improving of flexibility are, its systemic effects on the body, as well as its relation to systemic inflammation.
First, as a function of the body, flexibility is dependent on nutrition, just as any other function. The training of flexibility grows muscles, they become longer, it triggers the strengthening of tendons, based both on compositional refinements and structural improvements, strengthens fascia, and makes blood vessels grow into all of those. The majority of the new tissue is connective tissue, which consists of various types of collagen. Without sufficient supply of vitamin C, silica, and the amino acid hydroxyproline, collagen can not be built properly.
Flipping the perspective, we can first ask what would prevent flexibility, and derive the dependencies of flexibility from there. Flexibility will be decreased by those factors:
- years or even decades of not using muscles and joints to their capacity
- systemic low-grade inflammation, or serious illness, mostly due to nutritional factors,
- weakness of the antagonist muscle group, leading to lack of spinal reflex inhibition,
- weak mind-muscle connection due to deficiency of general exercise and movement
- bad posture,
- chronic psycho-social stress, leading to high Cortisol levels, and subconscious muscular tensions that easily get chronic, causing knots, small and big ones.
Second, about the systemic effects. It has been shown that flexibility training mobilizes stem cells. Next, flexibility training with a focus on fascia improves the perfusion of tissues with oxygen and nutrients, also improving the removal of waste products, as both blood and lymph gets pumped through the tissues. This includes the joints and their cartilage. Particularly, however, fascia get mobilized, and trained to redistribute forces through the tissues. Acocrding to science, that mobilization of lymph nd interstitial fluids is a central component of preventing lipedema.
An increased mobility of the core muscles, the diaphragm, and the rib cage improves breathing, both its depth and power. Finally, flexibility training has two major effects on the nervous system. It balances the sympathikus and parasympathikus (vagus) nerve, helping to alleviate the perception of stress. Last but not least, proper flexibility training improves the “inside sensory,” the proprioception, helping to elevate the body awareness, which contributes to a good balance. Any of those systemic effects have a direct link to Your future health and longevity.
Third, we have to mention the intricate relation between flexibility and persistent, low-grade systemic inflammation. Systemic inflammation is a state of alertness of the whole body. In recent years, inflammation has been identified as the main driver of accelerated aging. Systemic low grade inflammation and elevated oxidative stress can be detected by medical lab tests, although it is not measured in standard tests.
Now, inflammation involves chemical signaling between cells and tissues of the body, mediated by the immune system. Higher levels of those inflammatory messengers will lead to a wide range of unfavorable configurations throughout the body, often related to increased pain or reduction of functionality, or even critical deterioration of tissues. Systemic inflammation is implicated in several chronic health conditions, damaging the brain, nerves, heart, blood vessels, thymus, the gut and muscles. Very often, systemic inflammation is caused by nutritional factors.
Regarding mobility, systemic inflammation can result in general stickiness of fascia, decreased strength, loss of coordination, and decreased range of motion. In other words, systemic inflammation manifests in a strongly reduced flexibility.
It is very interesting to see that the systemic effects of a proper flexibility training can counteract systemic inflammation!
Here we have it, and actually it is not really surprising:
Proper flexibility training, besides proper nutrition, strongly contributes to general health and longevity.
The good thing being that it can be started at any age!
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