"Then, try pointing and flexing your toes, or stretching just your arms and torso, mimicking the cliché 'just woke up' stretch. To bring fluid back into your joints, try gently bending and unbending your knees and elbows, rolling your wrists and ankles or gently nodding your head from side to side."
From "Why Does My Body Feel Tight When I Wake Up?/And what can I do to feel better?" (NYT).
I'm amused by the idea that the right way to stretch in bed is to do an imitation of the cliché in-bed stretch. Maybe getting to sleep at could be improved by doing that rubbing-your-eyes-with-your-fists things.
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16 comments:
Amused? Have you tried it?
“Maybe getting to sleep at might could be improved by doing that rubbing-your-eyes-with-your-fists things.”
With mittens on!
That is exactly what my dog, a Chihuahua, does when he wakes up in the morning. He stretches to almost a complete horizontal line. Then, having exxhausted himself, he relaxes on the couch for a couple of hours before his walk. I am happy to follow his lead. Except for the stretch.
The key word here is Pandiculation.
It works to help warm your soft tissues up and move fluids into them.
All of your stretching should be a mix of pandiculation and active stretching.
Static stretching has been shown to lack effectiveness for the most part.
It works for me. I learned it from my dog.
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My headboard and my wife may both object to me doing these stretches in bed. But except that they are rude and impossible, they sound great.
At my age, that often ends in tears. Well, maybe not tears, but the pain of a charley horse
All of your stretching should be a mix of pandiculation and active stretching.
Second. Dynamic stretching is where its at. Do it every morning. Don’t wait for stiffness…
….and…never heard of a yoga mat?
(laugh) What Tim Maguire said at 1057. The NYTimes article was written for people living alone.
Journal of Bodywork & Movement Therapies (2011) 15, 268e280
HYPOTHESIS
Pandiculation: Nature’s way of maintaining the functional integrity of the myofascial system?
Luiz Fernando Bertolucci, MD
Summary
"Pandiculation is the involuntary stretching of the soft tissues, which occurs in most
animal species and is associated with transitions between cyclic biological behaviors, especially the sleep-wake rhythm (Walusinski, 2006). Yawning is considered a special case of pandiculation that affects the musculature of the mouth, respiratory system and upper spine (Baenninger, 1997).
When, as often happens, yawning occurs simultaneously with pandiculation in other body regions (Bertolini and Gessa, 1981; Lehmann, 1979; Urba-Holmgren et al.,
1977) the combined behavior is referred to as the stretch-yawning syndrome (SYS).
SYS has been associated with the arousal function, as it seems to reset the central nervous
system to the waking state after a period of sleep and prepare the animal to respond to environmental stimuli (Walusinski, 2006).
This paper explores the hypothesis that the SYS might also have an auto-regulatory role
regarding the locomotor system: to maintain the animal’s ability to express coordinated and
integrated movement by regularly restoring and resetting the structural and functional equilibrium of the myofascial system. It is now recognized that the myofascial system is integrative, linking body parts, as the force of a muscle is transmitted via the fascial structures well beyond the tendonous attachments of the muscle itself (Huijing and Jaspers, 2005).
It is argued here that pandiculation might preserve the integrative role of the myofascial system by (a) developing and maintaining appropriate physiological fascial interconnections and (b) modulating the pre-stress state of the myofascial system by regularly activating the tonic musculature..."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21665102/
This is most of the paper's abstract in PubMed. The full text is behind Elsevier's paywall.
For those who may be interested, the full-text pdf (courtesy of academia.edu) can be found by doing a cut and paste of the paper's title and entering it in the search box of Google Scholar. (Followed by a "carriage return".)
Google Scholar is a treasure because, unlike PubMed, it also can search the full text of a paper in various useful ways as well as by year, including ranked by date of publication.
("Pandiculation" gets 384 hits.)
like a cat or dog does when they first wake up, by extending your legs and arms wide and in opposite directions.
Cats and dogs have arms? Who knew?!?
Following the lead of cats and dogs, the next thing would be to take a dump in a box in the laundry room, or in the back yard.
What's next? An article on how to chew? Wiping one's ass? We're NYT readers raised by wolves?
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