With a Focus on Micro-Stretching

It’s impossible to go literally anywhere these days without running into something that has completely changed due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. One of the biggest changes is the amount of people that are now working from home. And, depending on the course of COVID-19 and the economy, this may be a change many office workers have to deal with long term. Many of these individuals are not set up to work from home. They may not have a designated work space or even all of the equipment needed to do their job entirely from home. In the clinic, I see these types of changes lead to pain down the road. Pain that comes from incredibly avoidable injury. Pain that can lead to lost time and productivity at work and, even worse, the inability to do what you love with who you love at home. Today we will discuss a technique that can play a key role in reducing the chances of avoidable injury as many people start, and continue, to work from home and that technique is called micro-stretching.

Over the past 6 weeks, Dr. Phil Finemore, PT, DPT, Cert. DN, Cert. VRS has provided WorkFitME, LLC’s Facebook and Instagram followers with #MovementMonday posts about neck and upper extremity micro-stretches to do during the day (you can find the first one in the series here on Facebook and here on Instagram). The thought behind micro-stretching is not to improve mobility, the stretches are not held long enough to improve the flexibility of the muscle. The main objective is to improve blood flow, give good input from the nervous system to the muscle being stretched, and to get the office worker out of positions that can cause imbalances over time that lead to pain. They are completed every 1-2 hours during the day. Each stretch is held for 10 seconds on each side. Doing them in a series from the neck and shoulder area down through the forearm and wrist will help relax the muscles being stretched and takes stress off of that tissue along with the nerves and blood vessels that run in and around the muscle.

Improving Blood Flow

The blood flow is a key part for a couple of reasons. One is, when our muscles get tense being held in one spot or working repetitively, the blood vessels that go to the muscle along with larger blood vessels that go to other areas of the body may be restricted from the tightness in the muscle. This won’t allow the by products the muscle releases when it is working to leave the area. That by product can cause inflammation around the muscle and tendon and, over time, lead to pain. That is one avenue that can be a cause of tendinitis around the elbow (tennis elbow, golfers elbow) and inflammation in the wrist (carpal tunnel). 

Affect on the Nervous System

The nerves around the muscle are also affected when they become tense or adapt to positions we stay in for long periods of time. When the tissue is tense, the nerves that make the muscle fire may not work as well. Nerves that go to other areas of the body that pass around and through these muscles can also be irritated if a muscle gets tense or shortened over time. When a nerve is irritated things like pain and numbness and tingling further away from the site of irritation can occur. Until the true source of irritation is relieved those symptoms will continue and progress. It is much easier to irritate an irritated nerve than calm it down, especially the longer it is irritated. 

Preventing Pain

Tendinitis and carpal tunnel are two of the top reasons people miss work and submit worker’s compensation claims and they are VERY AVOIDABLE, especially in office and work from home settings (we dive into this in our first injury prevention blog). Tendinitis and nerve pain have to be properly identified and treated appropriately to avoid chronic pain from developing and interfering with a person’s ability to make a living and live their life pain free. Micro-stretching is one piece of prevention that can be taken to avoid unnecessary pain and injury. If implemented with personalized work space modifications designed to prevent injury that is personalized to each client and their job, micro-stretching can be effective at reducing injury risk.

If you have some of these symptoms or want to avoid them contact us to see how we can help you work pain free and live pain free. You can watch the entire #MovementMonday mini-series on micro-stretching on our Facebook and Instagram pages.