Why allow us to stretch you?

In simple terms, fascia is a thin sheath that wraps around our muscles and organs, offering support and reducing friction during movement.

Injury, poor postural habits, stress induced muscle tension, physical inactivity and dehydration can cause the fascia to become unhealthy. Over time, adhesions and scar tissue build up to restrict the movement of the muscles and fascia, resetting your neurological pathways to become less responsive. The best methods to reduce this are FNS and SCS stretching.

What is facilitated neuromuscular stimulation (FNS)?

Active muscles are learning and sending signals to the brain, ultimately leading to constant adaptation. Static muscles, either in a stretch or in a massage, are NOT active at all, and thus, take substantially longer to adapt, IF they adapt at all. Using a high velocity device or percussion tool that we refer to as “The Gun”, we unlock your body’s fascial neuromuscular pathways with a pulsing mild pressure that acts very similar to a massage…only so much more effective. During the pulse we actively engage the muscle and move it through the entire range of motion while stimulating the nervous system. This combination produces immediate results, as well as long-term retraining of the neural programming of your myofascial connections. Massage, alone, is passive, and so is static stretching. Once you make it active, you unlock the muscle and the magic of what your body is capable of. ​This technique uses fast, targeted pulses to aid in your body’s tissue growth and repair. This type of vibration has even been shown to cause your body to produce osteoblasts (the cells that build your bones), increase blood flow, stimulate nerve receptors which immediately communicate with the brain, and reeducate the pathway from muscle to brain. Our FNS technique also helps relax sore and stiff muscles, improves mobility and range of motion, and accelerates warmup and recovery time for many clients. Activating the muscle with the targeted pulse helps break up scar tissue (adhesions) and help release entrapped nerves so your muscles, joints and nerves can move freely again.

What is strain counter strain (SCS) stretching?

To fully understand why SCS is the best stretching technique, you must first have a basic understanding of what ACTUALLY happens when you stretch a muscle. Although it’s a common assumption, muscles don’t exactly work like elastic bands. While there is an elastic property to muscle and tendons, when you stretch you don’t actually make the muscle longer. The muscle is fixed to tendons and those tendons are anchored to your skeletal system. There is no changing the shape of that. The muscles ability to “stretch” is a direct result of your nervous system’s ability to handle the pressure in any given range of motion. Your body is constantly sending signals back and forth between your nervous system and your muscles. It’s literally how we move. 

If you were to be pushed, why don’t you fall down? How do you stumble, adjust, and recover so that you don’t end up on the ground? It’s because the proprioceptors (nerve endings) in your feet send a signal up through your spine and to your brain as soon as they feel a loss of balance that says, “Buddy we are about to take a spill here… do something!”. The brain then sends a signal back down through the spine, through the nerves, and to your muscles. The muscles then take these instructions sent from the brain, and carry out the specific motor command, ultimately allowing you to regain your balance. 

So let’s apply that to stretching…You hold a static stretch and the muscle tells your body, “we are comfortable here, hang out, don’t worry, everything is safe”. A lukewarm sentiment, at best....least in the face of trying to create an effective change. So you hold for 30 seconds and there is only passive, slight learning which does not always have a lasting impact as the neurological system was not reprogrammed.

​With SCS stretching we begin with finding a comfortable stretch near your end range. From there, we have you actively engage the muscle and contract IN the stretch. This (in basic terms) sends a signal to your nervous system and tells it “we are safe here, we are strong and we can push further”. After the contraction, you then relax the muscle again, and because the nervous system has been communicated with and has learned, the range of motion immediately increases. This does NOT happen with ANY other form of stretching! And we repeat that cycle several times. This is completely different from any other form of stretching because we are actively rewiring the communication channels between the body and the brain, telling the body over and over again that it is safe to allow for an increased range of motion. That is why there are immediate results (and relief) with SCS and almost no immediate results with other forms of stretching.