why is stretching slightly painful and why is that good for us?
In: Biology
Physical therapist here.
Whether or not stretching is in fact good for us is actually a pretty complicated topic and not easily explained in ELI5 fashion.
Pain is also a super complex topic as it involves mechanical and neural inputs filtered through each individuals own personal experience, habits and trauma. Again, somewhat difficult to ELI5.
That said, pain at it’s most basic level is threat. Things hurt when our nervous system decides something is threatening. The thing is, these sensors aren’t always calibrated well due to our own experiences with things or lack thereof.
Have you ever been outside when its really cold and then come in and put your hands under warm water but it felt hot? That’s an example of the “calibration.”
Stretching, particularly when we are not used to it, is painful because we are putting our body in positions that make it feel threatened. As we stretch more and our body gets used to feeling these positions the threat lessens and we are able to stretch further.
Given that pain is based on threat its worth pointing out that extremely painful stretching is likely counterproductive because you aren’t giving your nervous system enough “space” to learn this position isn’t threatening. You’re making it very, very threatening. A strong but comfortable stretch is almost always more effective at improving tolerance than an overly painful one.
Again, what’s happening in your muscles and nervous system when stretching is way more complex than described here and it’s different depending on how the stretch is achieved (loaded, ballistic, static, passive, active etc.) but the paragraph above about pain as threat and stretching as getting used to threat and therefore feeling less pain is about as ELI5 as it’s going to get.
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