Rest Postures vs. Stretching vs. Mobility
In this week's episode, we're talking rest postures versus stretching versus mobility. What the heck is the difference and why does it matter? What you're going to find out is it boils down to your intention and your attention during the exercises.
I share about learning Phillip Beach's contractile field theory and archetypal postures of repose (rest postures) and how it was a pivotal learning moment for me 8 years ago. Not only did this make sense from a developmental movement standpoint and feel like a missing piece to the entire functional movement picture, but it was a novel way to access rest.
Within the context of understanding the power of the rest postures was also, a fundamental understanding of how it related to the nervous system and mirrored some osteopathic principles I was exploring at the same time, which continues to be a main driver in the MovementREV philosophy and methodology.
Resources mentioned in the episode:
Phillip Beach's book 'Muscles and Meridians': https://a.co/d/gpvWjFK
Blog Post about Rest Postures: https://www.movementrev.com/blog-pods/2018/6/20/rest-postures
Check out the IG resources on rest postures with the hashtag #movementrevrestpostures
Considering the viscera as a source of musculoskeletal pain and dysfunction is a great way to ensure a more true whole body approach to care, however it can be a bit overwhelming on where to start, which is exactly why I created the Visceral Referral Cheat Sheet. This FREE download will help you to learn the most common visceral referral patterns affecting the musculoskeletal system. Download it at www.unrealresultspod.com
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Rest Postures vs. Stretching vs. Mobility
[00:00:00] In this week's episode, we're talking rest postures versus stretching versus mobility. What the heck is the difference and why does it matter? What you're going to find out is it boils down to your intention and your attention during the exercises. If you're wondering why some stretches or mobility work you prescribed to your clients are not doing what you think they should be doing. You'll want to give this episode a listen
Hey there, and welcome. I'm Anna Hartman and this is Unreal Results, a podcast where I help you get better outcomes and gain the confidence that you can help anyone. Even the most complex cases. Join me as I teach about the influence of the visceral organs and the nervous system on movement, pain and injuries, all while shifting the paradigm of what whole body assessment and treatment really looks like.
I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in.
Hello, hello. [00:01:00] Welcome to another episode of the Unreal Results Podcast. Um, I'm coming at you with a new computer. We've been trying the front facing camera because there's, it's supposed to be better, right? Um, and with many things in life, I like. Drug my feet, like getting a new computer. I mean, it's just a big expense.
But, man, now that it's, I have it and it's new, I, that was long overdue. I probably waited at least six months too long, if not a year too long to purchase a new computer. So running on the new 14 inch MacBook Pro with the M two. Processing chip. It's so fast. I love it. So anyways, um, and coming at you again, like right before I head to the airport, this becomes a theme in my life.
This week we're talking about, [00:02:00] rest versus stretching versus mobility work. And this was, I threw up a poll on my Instagram to see what people wanted the podcast episode to be about. And this is like overwhelming won. So super stoked to talk about it. Part of part of why I wanna talk about it is because two reasons.
One, like stretching sometimes gets a bad rap in two, in two ways. So stretching gets a bad wrap because, , you know, there was research once upon a time that said, um, static stretching before activity decreases your, like vertical jump performance. So, Uh, that was a big push, , to like not do static stretching. And then, but also like static stretching is, like, stretching is good.
Like working on our mobility is good. Oftentimes we don't think of it as stretching, but just sitting on the floor is beneficial and that, that's actually the difference between, a rest posture, a seated rest posture, or [00:03:00] even a lying down rest posture. And, Stretching there is a, a, a very distinct difference.
And it's a little bit about the intention of what you're doing. Just talking about this reminds me of, um, about eight years ago, I took a course with Philip Beach. He's the author of, the book Muscles and Meridians, the Manipulation of Shape. It's one that I talk about often. It's a great book.
Even more great than the book is actually learning from Philip in person. , he is an amazing human, so smart, created this, um, movement model based on blending. Chinese meridians, evolutionary vertebrate biology and embryology. And the model he came up with is so thorough and so amazing, but what came out of his model was this emphasis on sensory input is the driver, [00:04:00] but also
a pattern emerged in his studies that floor based seated and laying positions among every vertebrate is how the body knows it's resting. And this concept of when you're sitting on the floor or laying on the. That it should be actually restful, that if you are sitting out on the floor and it's uncomfortable, if it's painful, then your body's never actually registering that it's rest.
So because we're so deconditioned, from sitting in furniture and, um, not really ever accessing the floor very much in our life, we sometimes in order to go back to a floor based experience, we need to use props and to basically meet the body where it's at, bring the floor to the body, and this.
Concept also makes sense as I was learning visceral [00:05:00] manipulation and the osteopathic types of manual therapies because there was this, um, paradigm shift of going from sort of traditional western medicine things of like forcing things to. Not using force, meeting the body where it is, in going into the positions of ease, into the direction of ease, and then noticing how the body, once it is met in that direction of ease, feels a little safer, and then can open up into new ranges of motion.
And then that also mimics this understanding of like the importance of our nervous system being wired for survial. The relationship between this fight or flight response of this sympathetic response, which is our primitive being this survival instinct, and then our rest, digest, recovery; parasympathetic nervous system, which is our [00:06:00] newer nervous system, but the nervous system that is responsible for the self-healing capacities and the, um, feeling safe.
Right? So this dichotomy between, um, feeling safe or not is a, is another way to think about forcing things or not, right? Because usually when you're forcing something, force is met with more force. Force is a threat, most of the time. And so, um, this is the importance of rest postures too, is that they actually feel safe and not threatening.
And a not threatening rest posture then means maybe it shouldn't feel like a stretch because oftentimes when we're seeking out a stretch sensation, it's not actually, um, comfortable and it's not actually. Even stretching the thing that's tight and lacking mobility. [00:07:00] So, anyways, so back when I learned from Philip eight years ago, he's an osteopath from New Zealand, so he doesn't come to the United States very often, and I feel so lucky to have met him when I did.
And, um, I, I went to his course and I learned this work and I was like, oh my gosh, this is the missing piece. This is the missing piece to all, like the functional. Screen and like emphasis on like, um, not just the functional movement screen, but also like the developmental patterns, right? The dynamic neuromuscular stability, dns, the, um, applied, um, Developmental kinesiology type of things that were like going back to sort of looking at the way babies developed in their movement patterns and revisiting some of those primitive, movement patterns to facilitate a better, connection into our core and more efficient movement patterns.
[00:08:00] And the missing piece of all of that work was. Even more regress stage of just the ability to be on the floor and rest. And so when I learned his work, I was like, this is a huge missing piece in the industry and I wanna share it with the world. So I started sharing with it and I started, that's when I started seeing how it integrated with so many other components that I was learning at the time.
But then things that I learned before. And, um, the other thing that emerged out of his work was this importance of the sensory organs getting more sensory information, specifically the feet, getting your feet out of shoes and socks, giving them a life as he says. And he is who I learned about the rock mats through.
And then I started sharing about the rock mats, um, right after that I met, I went home like the first day of the course, and I made my own. And it, it was like totally a huge change in how [00:09:00] I felt in my body, just introducing that sensory work. But anyways, the whole, this whole story is to tell you that, um, After I learned his work, I was like, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense.
I was talking to an orthopedic surgeon friend of mine and who is like my, you know, supervising physician as as an athletic trainer. And I said, oh, hey Shafe, like this stuff is like so profound and it's helped me with my back so much. And it's like, so cool. And he's like, okay, what is it? And I was like, well, it.
Adding in the sensory information with rock mats to my feet and then sitting on the ground, in these rest positions. And, then also, strengthening from the ground up. Like the value of sitting on the floor in these rest positions is you get to stand up from the ground, which is a built-in exercise.
And he looked at me. He's kind of one of those people that is just like no bullshit sort of guy. [00:10:00] And we, and when we were at like happy hour we were having a beer and he's like, what's so novel? Like, what's so new about it Anna? And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you basically just told me that what's helped your back pain is, improving your sensory information or proprioception, um, and stretching and strengthening your muscles.
And I was like, oh fuck man, when you put it that way, like yeah, it is, it is pretty basic. But again, like the intention with all of it is completely different than just stretching and improving my mobility and, working on proprioception and strengthen. My muscles, right? He's right. Those are all the things that we know, like tried and true methods for pretty much like any ache or pain in our body, right?
But the intention behind it really matters because the intention goes back to this fundamental understanding of how the nervous [00:11:00] system works. And also whether we can even trust a sensation, like a feeling of a stretch. And if seeking a stretch sensation is really actually changing our mobility because they are not all the same.
So resting versus stretching versus mobility work. They are not all created equal and they're very different. They might look the same from the outside when you see somebody doing them. The intention behind how you implement them when you implement. And why you implement them are very different. So that's really what I want to talk about.
And I, and I already obviously am telling you a story about meeting Philip Beach and going through his program. I already sort of told you, but the fundamental most important thing about the rest postures is meeting the body where it's at. So the nervous system feels safe and in that moment, In those moments when the nervous [00:12:00] system feels safe, it grants you more mobility because it takes you out of this protective pattern of protecting our ventral body, which is the front side of our body, right?
Going into that, almost like that startle reflex. And, um, because of that, when we. Then sitting, sitting in these rest postures while feeling safe, we've met the body where it's at, with props, with pillows, with towel rolls, whatever it is. Then we are actually, , able to progressively work on our mobility of our joints, specifically when we're working on our rest postures, our seated postures on the ground.
We're working a lot of ankle, knee, and hip mobility. And then there's some laying postures that would work on shoulder, and upper body mobility. But, but I'd [00:13:00] say the majority of us always, like if we're thinking about improving our mobility, most of us are thinking about improving the mobility of our hips and our ankles and our knees, and then realizing too that when we can improve our.
Mobility in our lower extremity, and I include hips as like pelvis, lumbopelvic area. When we can change the orientation to our pelvis over our legs, the rest of our spine kind of comes along with it and even our thoracic spine ends up being less stiff and we end up like having more rotation available in that kind of thing too.
So, the intention though needs to. It feel like nothing, and this is how it's different than stretching, because I would say that if you're doing a stretch, whether it's seated on the floor or standing, whatever you are seeking or searching for a stretch sensation and a stretch sensation, Whether it feels good or not actually is not a message of safety to the brain or not, because [00:14:00] oftentimes what provides this stretch sensation to us is actually an overstretching of nerves or neurovascular vessels. And that actually is seen as a threat to our nervous system because nerves hate to be compressed and they hate to be over elongated. And so that stretch sensation, even though we think sometimes that it feels good, that is not a message of safety to your body. And so that's often why too, why we sit in a stretch and like we don't really feel like it does anything.
It feels good, but it doesn't change our actual mobility. What actually changes our mobility is going in and out of the range of motion we have, and then not bypassing our end range, but being in our end range. And this is also when. Provide a stretch as an exercise to my athletes. I am very specific [00:15:00] and I say, please do not do this if it feels like a stretch sensation.
If we're actually stretching a tissue like a, a muscle or connective tissue that is quote unquote tight or short, right? It is not comfort. And it should not feel like a stretch sensation. It feels like your range of motion in the joint that that muscle or connected tissue surrounds the range of motion just stops.
Like you literally like can't go any farther. The range of motion stops and then in that specific body of tissue, whether again, muscle connective tissue or a combination of the two. Kind of feels like it's gonna explode. So if it's a calf stretch, if it's a hamstring stretch, it should be in the belly of those muscles, which is muscles and connected tissue, and it should feel like the range of motion stops at [00:16:00] either the ankle, the knee, or the hip.
And then it also feels like so much pressure. In the muscle belly that kind of feels like it's gonna explode. That's the best way I can explain it. The problem is we're so used, our bodies are so amazing at getting from point A to point B that oftentimes we don't recognize when we actually run out of range of motion in a joint and start moving in other joints around it.
More, right? Because that's what happens. You get one joint that doesn't move and then surrounding those joints, you get joints that move too much. And so if we're not careful about intentionally blocking our range of motion, we will just quickly go into the things that are already moving too much and move through them.
So then we never change our mobility. We overstretch tissues that are already over lengthened or even over lengthened tissues, [00:17:00] like nerves and vascular structures that don't like to be lengthened like that. And we feel a stretch sensation. But like I said before, a stretch sensation is not. Necessarily a signal of safety to our brain.
So even though in the moment we might look like we change in a range of motion the next day, we're right back to where we started. So that's really the difference. And when we look at how it sort of relates to mobility, mobility is something that I consider is like range of motion around a specific joint or
sequence of joints in a pattern that relates to our normal movements. But again, mobility is something that comes with a feeling of safety. As well as an intention, a paying attention of where the motion is [00:18:00] happening from, where the motion is happening, even in like a calf stretch. When you bring your knee forward of your foot, where in the foot and ankle is this motion coming from and is it distributed amount all of the joints, or being driven more through one than the other?
So mobility has a very specific intention around it. And it's also very dictated on our nervous system and if our nervous system feels safe or not. And so, hopefully that makes sense of how resting or seated rest postures are not stretching and stretching is not mobility work.
Mobility work can be seated rest postures, and that's why they're so powerful is if you just spend more time throughout the day, instead of sitting in furniture, sitting on the ground, meeting your body where it's at, you're going to very rapidly change your ankle mobility, your knee [00:19:00] mobility, and your hip and pelvic floor mobility.
And then also, like I said in the beginning, you have this added built-in benefit of your strengthening, that new range of motion. And when you can strengthen that new range of motion, that's another message of safety to the brain, to then keep that mobility. It's a very important component of it. So, these concepts of rest postures, Philip Beach in his book, lists about, um, 12 of them, I believe there's about 12 of them. And, and he actually turned it into sort of like, kind of like the functional movement screen, like a screen, like how well can people access these rest postures. And, I have a whole blog post on it, so I'm gonna link it to this podcast.. So go check it out, check out the videos.
Score yourself and see how you are. Sometimes instead of using his scoring system, I just like look at all 12 and be like, how many of these 12 postures can you [00:20:00] comfortably remember, because rest has to be comfortable, can you comfortably access? And then the best way to give messages to your brain that is time to rest, is to use those rest postures that you can access comfortably as frequently as possible throughout the day.
So throughout a day, your body has messages of rest. And this is sort of when I, eight years ago, when I first started learning this and I first started sharing it, one of the first people I shared it with was Michael Boyle. And when I shared it with him, it kind of blew his mind too. And it was like his argument for why putting a cool down back into programming was so important because in a cool down after a workout, your your muscles are like super supple and more receptive to newer ranges of motion.
And so you can easily improve your mobility because you don't have that sort of,[00:21:00]
Reflex from the, receptors in the muscles and the connective tissue. , resisting the newer range of motion cuz they're all warmed up and like things are, you've been moving your body and so like it's just an opportunity to like maximize that. So definitely check it out. Check out Phillip's book. I'll link that.
And this is a conversation that we'll have more, and, and I'll probably do a separate podcast episode just about the rock mat itself and why this is such a powerful tool. So, real quick episode for you today. But definitely check out the blog post and oh, on that note too, Philip, he emailed me the other day and he's back on the road teaching, and so if you live in Europe this summer, he'll be in Europe teaching at a couple conferences.
Or even if you are in Europe or the United States and want to bring him in and do a course, please let me know and I will connect you because he is, he loves to share what he [00:22:00] does and he would love to extend his trip, when he is traveling international from New Zealand. Thank you for joining me. I gotta head to the airport.
Have a great day.
