Body Workout Plan

When a person’s bones and joints easily move without being hindered throughout their entire design range they are said to have functional flexibility. But simply forcing a body to stretch and extend does not automatically become an exercise that promotes functional flexibility.

Common stretching exercises as well as other more structured exercise activities can easily harm the very muscles, tendons, and ligaments that the actions were intended to benefit. The result of these well-intended, but harmful, movements can leave the individual with permanent damage to the complex structures that compose the body’s skeletal joints.

In the popular exercise of pilates (check out Malibu Pilates), for instance, over-stretching and contorting the strong, but delicate, tendons as the practitioner places his or her limbs into extreme positions may cause injury and serious damage. Likewise, during the practice of ballet, the dancer, in an attempt to remain vertical can easily over stress joints. An important aspect of any exercise program should be the consideration of balance.

By this we mean that no one joint or muscle group is focused on to the exclusion of others, and that they are not stressed far beyond the natural ranges the muscle groups are designed to perform together. An unfortunate outcome of some exercise programs that limit their focus to this or that extreme motion is that the body is being trained to ‘ignore’ the many other more natural motions that should be occurring simultaneously.

The result of this can be a gradual loss of free-range mobility as the pain of movement gets greater and greater. The main point here is that the exercise practitioner should choose activities that do not encourage or permit any over stretching at all. The popular advertisement that proclaims, “No pain, no gain” has actually done a real disservice to the individual who believes it. Functional flexibility absolutely does not require muscles, tendons, and ligaments to be overstretched to the point of damage.