I get this question a lot when I'm palpating muscles during my exams. When I find really tight leg muscles, arm muscles or back muscles people say, "That's good right? That means it's strong." This is a commonly held belief, so I need to set the record straight.
Healthy muscle should be soft and squishy when relaxed and hard when you contract. They should never be tight when you're relaxed. When people have tight muscles they also think of stretching being the most important thing to relax the muscles. If you're big on stretching, I'm sure you've already come to the realization that it doesn't work all that well. In fact you can stretch and stretch and stretch and make very little difference in your muscles.
What's the real reason for the tightness you ask? Muscles contract for two reasons. The first is completely mechanical, the other is nutritional.
Lets start with the mechanical reason first. Your muscles are responsible for holding up your posture if your spinal mechanics are poor. If these muscles didn't contract, you would collapse forward somewhere. For example, with a lot of people, if their upper neck muscles didn't contract, they would be looking down all the time instead of forward towards the horizon. In others if they're lower back muscles were not contracted they couldn't stand up, much less walk. If they're upper back muscles were relaxed, they're shoulders wouldn't work and they might not even be able to raise their arms. For these people they absolutely must have tight muscles, even if they hurt. The solution for these problems is to fix their spinal mechanics and take away the need to have these contracted muscles. It's really simple when you have it explained and then experience the process and how your posture pops up and you can't slump.
With nutritional problems we need to start with a thing called a viscerosomatic response. This is when a stressed organ (viscera) causes a body (somatic) response. Everyone is familiar with a very common viscerosomatic response. When someone's having a heart attack, which arm hurts? The left, but why? This is a viscerosomatic response. The heart is under extreme stress when having a heart attack. Since the heart shares its nerve supply with nerves from the left arm, the left arm hurts right along with the heart attack.
This is an extreme version of a viscerosomatic response. There are a lot of more subtle responses that give me as a doctor an incredible amount of information about what's going on with your organ systems many years before disease sets in. I cannot tell you how awesome this is for figuring out deep routed, underlying problems that no one else seems to be able to figure out. These tight muscles exist all over the body and the person is usually completely unaware of them or their significance. However, I can tell a person what organ systems are stressed and undernourished and give recommendations to get those organs working strong again.
To recap, muscles can be tight for mechanical reasons and from organ dysfunction. The technology to fix both these problems has been figured out. The process is consistent and predictable and it's fun to see people's health return when they had given up hope.
Call the office and I can tell you more. (608) 277-1975
