Chapter 15: Tension-Relaxation - The Practice of Natural Movement

“Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.”

 

—Joshua L. Liebman

 

The first law of thermodynamics is that to produce work we need to expend energy. Kinetic energy—the energy of motion—is the outcome of the work primarily produced by the energy generated by muscular tension, which is itself the outcome of muscular strength. Muscular strength is the ability to exert tension and produce the force necessary to hold positions and perform movement. Simply standing requires some level of strength even if it’s only a minimal amount. Without tension, there would be no position, sequence, and timing taking place.

Practical, Adaptable Strength

 

For strength to be produced in a way that fits a particular practical purpose behind movement, muscle tissues modify their length, which is called contractility. Strength is expressed through distinct patterns of muscle contraction, depending on the four main kinds of physical action it supports:

• Accelerating

• Decelerating

• Transitioning

• Holding

Accelerating

When you want to initiate and accelerate the movement of anything that has mass (or “weight”)—a body part, the whole body, an external load or object—your muscles need to shorten to produce force, which is called concentric contraction. When you jump several feet away, for example, a concentric contraction occurs at the launch to accelerate your body and generate a takeoff. This acceleration is a motion in space (or displacement) at a given rate with respect to time, which is called velocity (or, in simple terms, speed). The greater the force produced with the greatest velocity, the more power ensues.

Decelerating

Conversely, when you need to decelerate anything, your muscles elongate to produce force as well; this is eccentric contraction. After jumping, for instance, your body uses eccentric contraction to decelerate upon landing to minimize impact and bring your motion to a stop.

Transitioning

Although we could say that movement is nothing but a constant transition, it might happen that you need to transition in the sense of both decelerating and accelerating seemingly simultaneously through plyometric contraction, which is an extremely fast transition between eccentric and concentric contractions. That’s what would happen if instead of landing to a static position, which means you only elongate the muscles in your legs to reduce velocity to zero, you have to swiftly bounce into another jump and produce great velocity by shortening the same muscles within milliseconds. This is why it is also sometimes called elastic strength. Indeed, the energy produced through eccentric contraction is briefly stored in the tendons and creates a recoil or “strain energy” that is transferred back to the concentric tension. I talk more about this aspect of muscular tension in Chapter 28, “Airborne Movement.”

Holding

Holding a static position implies avoiding motion and therefore preventing acceleration, which necessitates isometric contraction with no change in muscle length. Think of holding a half squat position for several seconds before jumping and immediately after landing a jump. It is sometimes also called yielding. When we hold a position, “potential energy” is produced.

NOTE

 

Interestingly, in the examples I’ve just given, the same muscles handle the tasks of increasing or decreasing velocity, transitioning, and holding. Like all other aspects of physical performance, tension occurs because of our intention to move, not because of analytical thinking as we move. While moving we must feel the expression of strength rather than thinking about it.

Understanding in-depth scientific details about every aspect of strength won’t turn us into amazing movers, although it helps design more effective training protocols to develop maximal strength and power and to increase capacity, which is a critical aspect of real-world physical capability. Our primary concern at this stage is to acquire simple, useful insights on how to move efficiently regardless of our current levels of strength.

 

Regardless of the type of muscular contraction employed for any specific movement or physical task, we know that the work produced comes at a cost called energy cost, which is the amount of energy used to perform such work. Naturally, we want to ensure economy so that the overall amount of energy spent for a given quantity of work remains minimal. The lower the energy cost for a given task and the more efficient we are, the more we delay lassitude and muscle fatigue. By not exerting more energy than needed, we can produce more force for a longer duration.

 

Tightness Mentality

 

Muscle strength, mass, and shape are often perceived to be the paramount fitness achievement. They are achievements without question, but not paramount from a Natural Movement perspective, as movement competency is priority.

The importance of strength for physical performance cannot be understated. However, it’s always good to remember that, biologically speaking, strength in itself is not the finality; strength is the means that enables movement and locomotion for practical reasons relating to self-preservation. In short, whereas physical movement develops and/or maintains strength, ultimately the purpose of strength is to serve movement, not the other way around.

Looking at strength as the be-all and end-all too often leads to an obsession with muscular tension and how hard muscles can be squeezed and pumped up. It’s as if modern men and women want to be as hard as the marble of the ancient statues that have inspired contemporary physical culture from more than a century ago to the more modern bodybuilding movement. However, the physiques of the sculptors’ models weren’t achieved by muscle-isolation exercises; they were the result of diverse athletic, natural movements. We can safely assume that those ancient bodies were able to do more than pose stiffly because they were nimble and able to move adaptively. As a matter of fact, most of the original Olympian games related to the diverse physical skills necessary for warriors to fight wars. The aesthetic outcomes of such training, including hypertrophy and muscle definition, were legitimately valued the way they are today, but they weren’t valued nearly as much as realistic, useful physical performance. I understand that this sounds more philosophical than practical, but you need to realize how a particular mindset turns into particular approach and expectation, which turns into particular behaviors and consequences.

If you want to achieve real-world movement efficiency, you must depart from the idea of muscle tightness and embrace the power of relaxation. Don’t misunderstand my meaning: I am not implying that strength and intense muscular tension are unnecessary or that you should avoid muscular effort by relaxing and stretching all day. I’m suggesting that to achieve movement efficiency, muscular tension and relaxation must work hand in hand. You must learn selective muscular tension and muscular relaxation.

Although we obviously understand that no movement is possible without some muscular tension, we must also understand that no movement would be possible if every muscle in the body was tensed at the same time. Simply try to fully contract every muscle you can in your body while you’re in a standing position and then try to run or jump. You can’t do it. You have produced maximum gross tension and zero net force.

Despite the enormous amount of tension in your body, you might be able to move a small amount because, despite your intention and effort, some of your muscles are relaxed even if you don’t perceive it. In any case the crazy amount of intentional tension in your body will make movement inefficient and very unpleasant, as if there is a conflict taking place in your body.

If you want to move a particular body part, you must enable the muscles responsible for movement in a given direction to tense and those responsible for movement in the opposite direction to relax, otherwise the force produced by antagonistic muscles would mutually cancel. Say you want to flex your arm (like a biceps curl) and extend it (like a triceps extension) at the same time. Could you do that? Of course not.

The net force is the amount of force directed in a given direction minus the force generated by the antagonist muscle at the same moment. You never need to spread tension to all muscles at the same time, and you don’t need to tense muscles that have nothing to do with the task at hand. This is known as irradiation: intentionally spreading muscular tension to areas of the body that are not directly participating in the movement or physical task at hand. Irradiation is something that you must absolutely avoid.

The problems with inadequate tension in movement are numerous and unfortunately not limited to increasing metabolic cost by wasting precious energy. Inadequate tension throws off your coordination; decreases force production, power, and endurance; makes you less responsive and accurate; and slows down your recovery in whatever movement you do.

Every movement rendered inefficient by inadequate tension can also be rendered completely ineffective—again, that means that movement is failed entirely—which makes you waste time before you can recover and resume your movement or transition to the next one. The bottom line is that the whole tension and relaxation principle is a very big deal when it comes to technique and movement performance.

Selective Tension

 

To perform movement efficiently, muscular tension must be selective. Selective tension is the optimal use of muscular tension to increase performance while minimizing energy expenditure. Selective tension enables you to connect, disconnect, and reconnect body parts, sometimes extremely fast, following the sequence and timing of a given movement pattern thanks to our ability to tense or relax muscles alternately. For tension to be employed efficiently, you must consider the following things:

• Where the tension is applied: Body parts and muscles that do not contribute to the movement should stay relaxed.

• When the tension is applied: If tension is applied to soon or too late, it is wasted. Tension must synchronize with the proper sequence and timing of the movement. Before action, muscles must stay relaxed; when the job is done, muscles must return to a state of relaxation.

• For how long the tension is applied: If you apply tension too briefly or for too long, movement might fail or significantly decrease in efficiency.

• How much tension is applied: Too much tension is obviously a waste of energy, and it can also compromise the effectiveness of the movement, reduce its efficiency, or disturb the next movement.

• What kind of tension is applied: The kind of tension needed in the legs to jump up isn’t the same as the tension needed to land after coming down (concentric contraction, eccentric contraction, plyometric contraction, isometric contraction).

To enable movement, tension takes place in the body just before actual motion occurs to ensure stability before the large muscles (or prime movers) that participate in overall stability generate most of the tension required for a dynamic movement. The production of power by large muscles or of momentum through the swift and wide-angle motion of body parts is bound to significantly disturb your initial positional set if it is weak from the start. Interactive disturbances are called motion-dependent effects and also interaction torque, which can modify your starting position and compromise the ensuing movement sequence you intend to perform. Whereas large, powerful muscles are responsible for generating force, smaller ones participate in directing the force efficiently—either before or after the production of force by the prime movers. A good example is the Forearm Swing-Up, where you hang on to a horizontal bar by your forearms and one leg that’s hooked over the bar on one side. Your free leg must extend upward and swiftly swing downward to generate body-weight transfer and upward momentum. The motion from your leg can easily disturb your overall position, starting with the positioning of your forearms on the surface of support; if you cannot keep your upper body position stable, then you won’t be able to properly transfer this momentum, and the action will fail.

In most cases, tension is not something you can think about as you move. It just happens—quickly, in many places, and with many changes as you transition from movement to movement while adjusting to the many variables of a complex environment. But not being able to think about tension doesn’t mean that you can’t be aware of it. Another part of your brain takes over that task so that you do it without thought. In truth, it’s fortunate that you can’t think about tension as you move because thinking is both too slow and too unreliable for the job.

Perception of Tension and Relaxation

 

It can be useful to acquire a basic perception of your ability to generate selective tension and to maintain relaxation by practicing some drills. If you find the following simple drills a challenge, what might happen when you actually move dynamically?

Perception of Selective Tension

The following selective tension partner drill is a very convincing illustration of how important the principle of selective tension is. In this drill, you must keep one arm as tense as possible, while keeping the other arm completely loose. There is complete dissociation between the two arms.

 

1 Stand close to your partner, facing the person. Bend one arm at a 90-degree angle and keep the other fully relaxed to the side of your body. As your partner places an open hand on the biceps of your bent arm and progressively presses down, you must resist the pressure. At the same time, your partner pushes your loose arm to the side away from your body with the top of their open hand pushing against the back of your forearm; do not resist this pressure. (Also avoid lifting your arm and pretending you are relaxed, of course.)

2 To create tension in the tense arm and resist the downward pressure of your partner’s hand, you must involve other body parts to remain stable, which also tends to create tension in the arm that is supposed to be completely relaxed. You’ll also tend to reduce tension in the tense arm as you’re trying to keep the other arm loose.

This drill gets even more complicated when you have to repeatedly switch the positions of your arms—and thus also switch the tension and relaxation—which means you must quickly recover the same levels of tension and relaxation in the opposite arms. You will find yourself rapidly overthinking, getting confused, and probably holding your breath, looking down, and being unable to pay attention to anything else.

So, if dissociating opposite arm tension/relaxation while you’re consciously paying attention to only this aspect is a challenge, can you imagine what happens when movement involves your whole body (as when you climb, crawl, swim, or punch) as you move on diverse terrains?

How many times will you use tension too early or too late, apply it too briefly or too long, use too much or not enough of it, and generate it in the wrong places? It’s not just a matter of wasting energy; it’s a matter of overall performance. Approach every new technique with concern for selective tension with proper timing, and you will shorten your learning curve and boost your progress and performance.

When you’ve developed great relaxation in performing a given pattern repeatedly and consistently, the first part of the job is done, but the task isn’t over. Movements such as walking, running, crawling, or swimming, that tend to provide the close-to-perfect replication of a short cycle, enable you to find a “rhythm” where you can feel relaxed and in control. Any movement can feel great after enough practice, especially if you do it on predictable, smooth, linear surfaces. But the movement might become a challenge or be completely disrupted the moment the environment becomes different or more complex or when sudden, temporary transitions to completely different movement patterns become mandatory. This is what happens in the real world. You may feel relaxed as you hold a pose in a meditative stance indoors—with a sense of perfect breath control and balance—but that sense of calm is suddenly destroyed when you try to stay balanced at a height on top of a tree branch. Where has your “self-mastery” gone? Why are you suddenly unable to relax? Will you be able to maintain the same levels of relaxation, or do you fall back into overall physical and mental tensions you thought you could keep at bay when everything—your movement and the whole context—was extremely simplified?

I’m not saying that superfluous tensions should never occur when you’re dealing with more challenging environments—because the “skill” that is relaxation in movement is particularly challenging when movement is adaptable—but the tension should not exceed what is necessary to remain effective. Adaptability is not just the ability to handle more complex environments that change; it’s also the ability to handle them efficiently, which means you have to remain as relaxed as possible.

NOTE

 

When you have a really good command of selective tension, you might enter the famous state of “flow” where you feel totally in control of your movement as if it were “effortless” (which, of course, it is not). It might almost feel as if it is happening in slow motion sometimes. Remember, when in motion, flow—or relaxation, for that matter—is not the absence of tension; it is the optimal use of it. Therefore, if you want to master relaxation, you first must master tension.

 

Perception of Relaxation

When you practice, you might sometimes find yourself overthinking and tensing, and just thinking of relaxing might not help you to actually relax. When this happens, take a short break and do the following drills with the goal of resetting your mental and physical sense of relaxation. It should take only a few seconds. Make sure that you combine these drills with ample, relaxed breathing.

 

1 Assume any position you want. Hold your breath as you contract your whole body (as many body parts and muscles as you can) for five seconds. Then relax five seconds while strongly exhaling. Repeat. The goal of this drill is to paradoxically increase tension to enable the body to relax. This is a form of conscious pandiculation.

2 Swiftly rotate your hips in both directions, but let your arms be fully relaxed, so they can be moved by the motion of your hips without any active or intentional arm movement on your part. This drill reconnects you with a good sensation of tension (active hip motion/relaxation and passive arm motion).

3 In a standing position, move your hips, spine, shoulders, and neck in an undulating manner, as if you are a dancer.

NOTE

 

Pandiculation is what we call “stretching” as in stretching when we wake up. As a matter of fact, you could extend your arms and pretend that you are doing a morning stretch for an effect similar to what this drill is about.