Joints feel tight and stiff? They could even feel too loose in some positions and stiff in others simultaneously. I often hear students and patients at our clinic complain of tight joints or pain points, and their reaction is to get a massage or stretch. I personally have to search deep to decide what path to take when I am training hard, recovering, or getting back into my usual workouts after time off. There are a few facts to understand and mindsets to play around with to seek the best outcome for yourself in your practices.
A joint is where two bones meet—like at the ankles, knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders. We even have joints between each vertebra along the spine. Every joint in the body carries a responsibility: to develop and maintain stability, strength, and range of motion. When one joint is off—whether it’s overly mobile or too stiff—it affects the entire chain. Just like dominoes, dysfunction in one joint can trigger compensations in others.
If a joint is hypermobile and lacks stability, the surrounding joints may tighten to compensate, leading to inefficient movement patterns. On the flip side, if a joint is stiff or overly tense, nearby joints may become unstable and end up doing more than their share of the work. I like to call this misuse, rather than overuse.
Muscles move bones, and therefore the joints. We need balance and harmony in the muscle groups around each joint structure. Take the shoulder for example. The rotator cuff connects the shoulder blade, or scapula, to the upper arm bone, or humerus. Other shoulder muscles connect the scapula to the axial skeleton and all work in harmony with larger shoulder muscles. There needs to be balanced strength within these groups and among each other. If you tend to round your shoulders forward, then you will develop tight pec and upper trap muscles. There is an imbalance and disharmony with the surrounding muscles. You may feel the desire to get a massage, and while this is helpful, the long-term solution will be to strengthen the rotator cuff muscles and back extensors, as well as eccentrically strengthening the muscles that feel “tight.”
On the other hand, someone like me tries to move through everything. I work side by side with the absolute best chiropractors, PTs, and LMTs, and even still, I deprive myself of body work. We sometimes develop scar tissue after even the tiniest injuries. Sometimes we have an asymmetry in the body or a movement pattern that causes trigger points or overused and misused muscles that simply need breakdown to accept all the movement and strengthening more efficiently.
As always, I prefer a life of balance. My workouts usually consist of constructive rest which is restorative. I do find that stretching in the middle of a session is best with movement and strengthening before and after. In the BASI Block system, we lay our sessions out this way for this exact reason, with the stretch block in the middle, surrounded by working all the muscle groups and spine in all directions and relationships to gravity.
Some points to shift your mindset:
- Overuse is often misuse.
- Think of your body like the machine or instrument that it is and keep it in tune.
- Tight muscles are often weak. When muscles feel tight, the tendency is to massage and stretch, but we need to strengthen eccentrically to have strength in the range of motion.
- Loose joints or lax ligaments make it even more important to dial back your range of motion to ensure more strength. Make movements only as big as you can stabilize the structure it is coming from. Move from your muscles rather than simply how far the joint might be able to go based on ligament length. This will help even someone with hyperextended knees and elbows.
- We all have an athlete within us. Train like one and get that massage or bodywork.
- We are often a combination of tight and loose, even within one area such as the hip or shoulder. The key is to strengthen short, concentric, and long or eccentric… Pilates Pilates Pilates.
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