The Research That Changed How I Think About Tightness

We’ve all felt it…

Tight hips. Stiff backs. That urge to stretch because something just doesn’t feel right.

But what if everything you’ve been told about stretching… isn’t the full story?

In this episode of Making Muscle Memories, I share one of the most defining moments in my career—the first time I truly understood that muscles don’t actually “stretch” the way we’ve been taught.

This realization didn’t come from a textbook.
 It came from injury, frustration, and working with a student who had been in pain for years… despite doing everything “right.”

Inside this episode, you’ll discover:

•  Why tightness is often a protective response, not a flexibility problem 
•  How traditional stretching can actually reduce strength and stability
•  What I learned from biomechanics and Muscle Activation Techniques that changed everything 
•  And how shifting from stretching → strengthening transformed not only my body… but my entire approach to fitness 

I also take you inside a real coaching moment—where instead of forcing someone deeper into a pose, we pulled back… rebuilt strength… and eliminated pain.

This is where the foundation of my Isometric Method truly began.

If you’ve ever:

•  Felt tight no matter how much you stretch 
•  Been told you just need “more flexibility” 
•  Or found yourself stuck in cycles of pain and temporary relief 

This episode will challenge the way you think about your body—and open the door to a completely different way of training.

Muscles aren’t designed to stretch.

They’re designed to produce force.

Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
00:51 – Muscle actual strengthen vs stretch
01:53 – Why do our muscles get tight?
03:15 – The scientific rationale for stretching
06:34 – Stretching and tightness
10:54 – The Isometric Method

Resource:
Rossi, L., Pereira, R., Simão, R., Brandalize, M., & Gomes, A. (2010, 01). Influence of Static Stretching Duration on Quadriceps Force Development and Eletromyographic Activity. Human Movement, 11(2). doi:10.2478/v10038-010-0020-4

If you’re ready to build strength in a way that supports your joints, reduces pain, and helps you stay active as you age…

You can explore my full training platform, FIS OnDemand, at www.fisondemand.com

WHO IS LAUREN EIRK?
Lauren is a 40-year fitness veteran, MAT-Rx Full-Body Specialist,  specialist,  Certified Yoga Therapist  C-IAYT, and Certified Yoga Instructor E-RYT 500.   She is the founder of FIS OnDemand™, The 5-Step Isometric Method™, and Fitness Integrated Science. She focuses on joint longevity for adults 50+ through science-backed resistance training to help you pinpoint your weak areas, correct strength imbalances, reduce pain and inflammation, and restore mobility.

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Transcript

Speaker 0:02

After 40 years of working in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength doesn't come from just exercise alone. It comes from experience. Every challenge, every setback, and every recovery creates an imprint of who we are. My name is Lauren Eirk, and I'm the founder of the Isometric Method as well as the creator of Fitness Integrated Science on Demand. Through my podcast, Making Muscle Memories, I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work. I want to help you to train smarter, age stronger, and help you to build strength that lasts a lifetime. We are all building muscle memories. One rep, one story, one experience at a time. Hi, welcome to the Making Muscle Memories podcast. My name is Lauren Eirk and I will be your host. This episode is about stretching and the moment that I realize that muscles actually strengthen versus stretch. I think everyone has this feeling or have had the feeling of being tight, stiff, and not able to move like they want. Maybe this has happened to you when you've gotten off of an airplane, you try to be in a hard situation where you've been stuck between two people in the middle seat and you just can't wait to move. Maybe it's when you get up in the morning and you just want to get your day started and get some energy going. Maybe it's just because of some sort of repetitive motion. You've been outside and you've taken a really long walk, and now your hips and legs and calves feel really tight. Animals stretch all the time. I have cats at home and I watch them get up from a nap and stretch all the time. And you do see people warm up with stretching. You see people cool down with stretching. You see people stretching in the middle of a set. But the question always becomes, you know, why do we get tight? And this is something that has shaped my work forever. I have been working on this my entire life because I've always been plagued with injuries since I was at a very young age. And I've always told by many therapists and doctors that the problem was because I was tight, right? When I was in ballet, my mother put me in ballet at age 14. I was always amazed by some of these girls that would come in the first day and they could throw their legs up on the bar, they could do tour jetes across the ground, they could turn their feet way out, they could point their feet really well. And I actually had a ballet teacher once tell me that I needed to work on stretching my feet, literally, putting my toe down the floor and putting weight against my foot because my feet didn't point as well as they should. Well, I come to find out as I got older that I wasn't meant to do point shoes because my feet really don't go that way. I happen to be more flat-footed. Now I was really good at modern dance and I could dance in ballet slippers, but when I got to be in point shoes, it was just it for me. And so I definitely think that structure plays so much into how somebody is able to move, even though in our culture we always think that if we stretch more, somehow we're going to become more mobile. Now, for whatever reason, I got involved into yoga when I was in my early 20s, probably because if you listen to my first podcast that I did, I did so much overuse in so many classes and stepaerobics and high-impact aerobics and just virtually beat my body into submission. And so by the time I was in my mid in my early to mid-20s, I was in a chronically tight situation. And this is what brought me into yoga. And I had the same sort of experience. When I walked into yoga, I was very tight. I had a hard time getting into a lot of the postures, and I do believe that it's a combination of muscles not used to contracting there and also having the wrong kind of structure. But when I had my first yoga injury, um, I started studying biomechanics because I kept thinking to myself, you know, I don't know anything. I got to learn more. And I can remember once, and I was I was in a class, in a lower extremities class, and there was a piece of research that came out. Now I was in a room full of a lot of guys that were very smart, they were all biomechanists, and this in this, I'm gonna read this to you, but it's uh from NASM, it was back in 2010, and it was about the scientific rationale for stretching. And so in this article, they said that there is moderate evidence to indicate that acute prolonged, meaning greater than 60 seconds per muscle group, pre-exercise, static PNF stretching, that means like holding a stretch, like stretching your calf or stretching your hamstring, performed in isolation, which means without a warm-up, performed in isolation, that it can actually decrease our strength output anywhere from 3 to 7%. And in this article, it also said that static stretching could have an analgesic effect on muscles, meaning that it makes muscles actually go to sleep, meaning they're weak, weaker. You know, when you're under anesthesia, you have no strength, right? And I can remember at the time everybody knew in the class that I was someone that did a lot of yoga, and that was something that I was really proud of, right? And everybody turned around, all these guys, and they kind of looked at me and I thought, what? And I think that they all thought that I was going to explode. And I remember at the time saying, well, you know, what does this article mean? Because it doesn't tell me anything about, you know, who was in this study, what did they do before? What stretch are they talking about? How often have they done this? What was their age? What was their experience? What time of day? There's all kinds of things that were left in that study, but it still really shook me to the core because I realized that now that this had come out, I was gonna have to go through a lot of work. So, fast forward, I dove into uh studying biomechanics as well as muscle activation techniques, which really rocked my world. And I learned that muscles actually don't stretch and that they strengthen, they actually strengthen. So when muscle has been through, our joint has been through a stress, a trauma, an overuse, an underuse, mineral deficiency, dehydration, that the body's natural response is to tighten up, much like we do when we're walking on ice, which is something that my mentor, Greg Roskoff, always says, you know, muscles tighten up as a protective mechanism for being unstable. But there's this one time I wanted to talk about that I actually had this experience really handed to me full on. And this was actually with another student. Now, honestly, I learned from having to rehab my own knee. I already learned that the more stretching that I did, the more I hurt and the tighter I got. So I'd already kind of had this idea, and I remembered that I was trying to figure out a way to teach it to a bunch of yoga instructors. Now, these yoga instructors that came to my course, they were coming through a 200-hour teacher training that I had written, Yoga Integrated Science Teacher Training, and they all wanted to become registered yoga teachers. Many of these were senior teachers who had been teaching a really long time, and they came to my training specifically because they knew that I was teaching a biomechanically based anatomy-based teacher training, and I was not so far into the philosophy, but much more into the physical/slash medical side of yoga, which has always been my focus. Now, this girl, this girl that came in, first day, she was been teaching for like five to ten years, and we were interviewing each other and you know, introducing everybody to the class, and she said to the group, I have been teaching yoga for six years, and I have been in pain for most of it. And I looked at her and I was like, Whoa. So here it is, this instructor who's been leading all these people, and she's telling the group that she's been in pain. And I knew that I had my work cut out for me because as I watched her practice, I realized that literally every pose that she did, she was pulling herself into everything. And she had, you know, I guess if you looked at her from the outside, you would think, oh, she has a beautiful body and a beautiful practice. All the things that we think of as a fit person and someone that is really good at yoga, which by the way, has nothing to do with it, right? Because you don't know what's going on on the inside. But there's this one day that she came to me and she was very distraught because she wanted to get into this posture called revolving triangle, paravritta parjvakanasana, uh, revolving side angle, rather. And in this pose, you have to go into a lunge and then twist yourself around so that your elbows and on the outside of the forward knee, then you have to reach your arm around back and clasp behind your back. I know that sounds crazy, but that's the pose for the style of yoga that she was accomplishing. And in her mind, because she couldn't do this, there was something wrong with her. And so she wanted me to give her an adjustment to try to pull her into the pose. And I've had my own share of many yoga adjustments that hurt me and injured me the next day. So I walked over to Sarah and I looked at her. And guess what? The pose from where I stood was a mess. She had yanked her hips all around. She was struggling, she was panting, she was breathing really hard, and she was like almost holding her breath because it hurt so much. And she wanted me to walk behind her, grab her hands, and clasp them behind her back because that's what every yoga teacher had ever done. Well, instead, knowing what I knew about Sarah, she had always been in pain, I pulled her out of the pose. I said, You know what we're gonna do? I want you to come up. I want you to come out of the lunge a little bit. Don't go so deep in the pose. And she looked at me. What do you mean? My foot needs to be on the ground. I'm like, don't worry about that right now. Pulled a foot off the floor. I took her hands away from her back and I unraveled her, came out of the twist. Then, without using her hands and momentum, I pulled, I let her move into the pose as far as the body would allow. And guess what? Her elbow didn't even pass her forward knee. And I said, I want you to hold that right there. Then I placed my hand here, had her push into me, which made her engage her core for the first time. And she thought it was amazing. She, her face just lit up and she goes, I've never felt anything like that before. She had never felt her core, which what rotates the core. She had never felt the core ever in the pose. All she'd ever felt was strain, pain, and discomfort, and she could never do it on her own, even though every yoga teacher had brought her to the front of the room as an example to the other students, pulled her into the pose, and she got a badge of honor because she could get into the pose. Well, I got to work with her and all of my students for the next eight months, or I guess it was no, I take that back, 10 months in that teacher training. And I watched her embrace this new methodology. And I talk about this a lot in my first podcast, and I will talk about it more, the isometric method. And this was when I was really honing that and really understanding what I was having to understand through my own injuries and my own setbacks. And I came to realize that, first of all, you know, some people can never move into certain poses. Some people should never do certain exercises or activities. I don't care if your best friend can do it, I don't care if everyone on your block can do it. There are going to be certain things that you're not going to be able to do. And we have to accept that. We have to learn how to like who we are and find activities that match our structure. But if this girl wanted to become a yoga teacher, this is what she was into. She had to unlearn what some yoga teacher down the road had taught her about what this pose was supposed to look like. And we taught her how to fit this pose into her body, not try to fit her body into that pose. Over the course of those 10 months in that teacher training, she did increase her range of motion. She did not only reduce her pain, she eliminated her pain. And she got so much stronger because we pulled back out of the pose, we looked at the components of the pose, we looked at the joints of the pose, the hip, the knee, the core, the shoulders, the everything, the foot, the ankle. And we got all the individual parts strong through a progression of isometric training all the way into even dumbbells and strength training and other sort of challenges and endurance training. What she learned by learning how to engage her muscles in the poses and setting up resistance scenarios in those poses is that when she went out to run, when she went out into the gym and did her lunges and leg presses and whatnot, she was stronger. She had more endurance, and most importantly, she had less pain and less tightness. And so this was such an important thing for me to learn watching the student transform over time, is that when we put the right kind of forces against our body, your body will give you the all the range of motion that it needs. Now I know that we kind of think that, you know, we are we are better at something when we can go longer. We maybe we're better at cardio because we can run further, or we're better at weight training because we can lift more, or we're better at going through yoga because we can stretch further into the poses. But one thing that I will say, and you're gonna hear me say this a lot through this podcast, we need to get away from always thinking that we have to look like somebody else, or we have to sort of um mold our body into some sort of thing that it's not designed to do. It doesn't matter who or what is doing something. What matters is how we are today and how we are the next day. So if I look at this girl and the way she progressed through her yoga practice, from the outside person, it may look like she didn't progress at all. But what she learned through that, the amount of humility that she learned, the amount of resilience that her joints learned, the amount of strength, the amount of just brute core strength and control that she learned over that 10 months, that laid the foundation for her to, I don't know, maybe, who knows, maybe she would get further in the pose. But what she learned is that she didn't care anymore because she wanted to learn how to move without pain. And one thing that I've learned in my 40 plus years of working with people from age 40 on up is that most people want to get out of pain and they want to be able to move. When you get to be, if you're not there yet, let me just give you a spoiler alert. When you're in your 50s and 60s and 70s, you're gonna want to be able to get down the floor and do stuff and get back up. You're gonna want to be able to lift things without hurting your back. And that's exactly what I want to do with my work, with this podcast, and I hope that this has inspired you. So, what's the takeaway from today's episode? Muscles are actually force producers. They are designed to strengthen. So sit on that a little bit, we'll be back for more. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.