It's actually retraining your nervous system... Say whaaaaatttt?!?
When we stretch a muscle, sensory receptors in our muscles called Muscle Spindles send signals to our brain.
At a certain level of tension/stretch, these Muscle Spindles will perceive that the muscle is in danger of sustaining damage so will send a signal to the brain to initiate the 'stretch reflex'. This then causes the muscle to contract and resist any further stretch.
This contraction of the muscle in turn pulls on the muscle tendons (that connect the muscle to its attachment sites)
Within the muscle tendons are yet more sensory receptors called Golgi Tendon Organs (or GTO's for short)
These GTO's get put under tension from the contracting muscle and a similar process happens. At a certain level of stretch/tension, the GTO's send a signal to the brain that the tendon is in danger of sustaining damage.
As tendons have a much poorer blood supply than muscle, if a tendon gets damaged, it can take much longer to heal than a muscle so the 'inverse stretch reflex' gets initiated. This reflex causes the muscle to relax to ease the tension off the tendons
So you see.... stretching doesn't lengthen muscles. Instead by participating in stretch based activities, we are retraining our nervous system to feel comfortable in a new range of movement where the stretch reflex is initiated at a later stage of the movement.
Life is sensory - movement matters!
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