When we experience stiffness, restricted range of motion or pain in general, we are likely to blame muscle tension. We conclude that if our muscles are tight, then the problem is symply that...we have tight muscles. The answer to this this problem is usually stretching or massage. If you have pain or restiction in an area, a massage thereapist might put their hands on you and say "your muscles are really tight here" and conclude that this is the source of your pain, and the answer is to massage the muscles until they are not tight anymore. Sometimes this does the trick, but more often than not, you will have tight muslces in that area a week, a day, or even an hour later. What is the answer then? Get massage once a week for the rest of your life? If you enjoy seeing a massage therapist, that would be great, but have you ever stopped and asked yourself, why your muscles in this or that area keeps getting tight and restricted? Is there something else that can be done to help you?
When we expericne discomfort or even pain, we want to do something about it right away, rub the area, stretch the area, ice, heat, whatever. Stretching can be helful, but what makes muscles tight in the first place? What controls the contraction and lengthening of a muslce? We are built from innervated tissue, not clay or stone. If a muslce is tight, then the nervous system is sending the signal to the muscle those nerves control to shorten. Sometimes stretchign or massage can be a helpful suggestion to the nervous system to let go of these areas and allow them to legthen but not if you need them to be tight to function.
If, for instance, a person needs to clench their glutes or tighten their hamstrings unessisaraly just to stand upright, becuase they are not stacked well in gravity, no amound of stretching or massage is going to allow those areas to loosen up. You can stretch your hamstrings all you want, they will be tight again an hour later. Likewise, if your shoulders are slupped forward, or you have to exert force to hold them back, good luck having that massaged out. We typically are very short sighted in they way we recognise and treat health and wellness issues, we only see the result of the problems and do not even suspect that those results might be cause by using our bodies ineffecitenlty.
A graceful well organized system does not exert unnecessary strains to do ordinary daily tasks. Even a high performance athlete will not use unnecessary force to do great feats, they are trained in efficiency. We could learn better effeciency as well, by allowing our bodies to go about dailly activities with a minimum of excessive force. For this to occure we need to be able to sit, stand, and walk with only the muscle tension necissary to do those things. This mean our bigger, more powerful muscles need to be at rest when not being used, and the smaller deeper muscles of posture and movement need to be more active. For this to occure a person needs a better since of embodyment, muscles and connective tissue that are adheared to one another need to be differentiated, a person needs to be better supported in gravity, and they need to learn to move about and do things with ease not force.
In conclusion, most of the activities we engage in to combat stiffness, pain, and to help recover from injury may help in the short term, but a weed will continue to grow back until you pull up its roots. By getting massage and stretching you are probably doing some short term good, but probably not getting at the root of the problem. Rolfing is wholesitic, thus addressing the system as a whole, trying to build a more efficient and supported system, stacked in gravity, moving with ease and grace. Your stiffness, your discomfort, your tight muscles are not the problem, they are the result of a bigger problem.
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