A vote for tolerance
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
Does stretching increase range of motion by changing the physical characteristics of soft tissues (“plasticity”)… or our neurological tolerance for elongating it? It’s one of those surprisingly basic body mysteries. Here’s a fresh new data point in the plasticity vs. tolerance debate, from Konrad et al:
The increased range of motion could not be explained by the structural changes in the muscle-tendon unit, and was likely due to increased stretch tolerance possibly due to adaptations of nociceptive nerve endings.