MOBILITY/SMR

Mobility and self-myofascial release are extremely important aspects of every single athlete’s training program, they are overlooked much more often than they should be. Here at Efficiency Strength Training, LLC we always begin our sessions with some form of dynamic warm up and end our sessions with some form of mobility and self-myofascial release. The terms peripheral neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretches and self-myofascial release (SMR) are terms that most people do not recognize outside of my field, so I want to spend some time explaining the science behind these techniques. PNF stretches are common procedures performed by physical therapists, athletic trainers, and chiropractors. This is a partner stretch where the whole idea is to use opposing muscle groups (what we call: agonists and antagonists) against each other to lengthen a specific muscle. An easy way to explain this is your bicep and tricep muscle. When you contract your bicep muscle to curl your hand up in a bicep curl, the tricep has to lengthen because it does the opposite motion of curling. The same goes vice versa for a tricep push down. In relation to SMR techniques, it is basically the same thing that a message therapist does to you. You are applying pressure to a certain muscle via a foam roller, lacrosse ball, PVC pipe, etc. to inhibit and lengthen that muscle. The science behind this is that when you apply this pressure to a muscle, that muscle sends a signal to your brain saying “ouch this hurts, please stop!” As you spend time on that muscle the brain sends a signal back to the muscle spindles (mechanisms in the tendons of a muscle that monitor length-tension relationships) saying “everything is okay.” Therefore, relaxing the muscle. This is just a short synapsis to our philosophy for applying mobility and SMR at Efficiency Strength Training, LLC, but it is a great look into what the thought process is behind training the efficiency way!