From the most sedentary desk jockey to the most nimble ballerina, people of all stripes will say they feel tight. Attend any yoga class and you’ll get to listen to the human pretzel next to you say how tight they are. Why do we all, no matter what our background, seem to be chronically tight? It’s because we are playing fast and loose with the term.
Key Concept #1: Tightness Is A Subjective Experience
We’ve all seen a dancer do the splits. For a dancer, such large ranges of motion are a normal part of life. Your average Joe or Jane, on the other hand, would likely pull their groin at the mere attempt. And yet, of the two, the dancer is more likely to complain about being tight. This is because the feeling of tightness is often a subjective experience that really comes down to a person’s baseline.
Key Concept #2: Tightness Describes A Host Of Different Situations
Although feeling tight is subjective, being tight is a real phenomenon. However, ‘tight’ has become a catch-all term. Muscles that are tense, that are stuck in shortened positions, or that are sore often get lumped together under the same label, but each one has different causes, different effects, and may require different solutions.
Related: 3 Causes Of Tightness Stretching Won’t Fix
Getting A True Gauge On Tightness
Since the feeling/experience is subjective and the underlying causes could vary, how do we decide if a muscle really is ‘tight’? We need to establish points of reference. Think of it a bit like triangulating a signal—with enough pieces of information you can zero in.
Movement assessments are one powerful point of reference. Movement assessments check how far your joints move compared to an established standard. Observing, for example, that a shoulder can’t go through 180 degrees of flexion may be an indication of muscle tightness.
A personal and/or medical history is another important point of reference. Joints that can’t move freely, like our shoulder example, could be due to a tight muscle, but there could be another cause like a past injury or surgery. It is important to know about any confounding data before we can truly decide what is or is not tight.
Another possible point of reference is to look at other muscles around a supposed trouble area. Sometimes a muscle is tight because some other muscle is not performing its job. In that case, the tightness is misleading because the problem is not with the muscle in question, but rather with some other actor in the scenario.