Flexibility has never been my strong suit. From ballet classes when I was younger to yoga classes in recent years, I have always had a consistent dread around stretching. Where everyone else was aiming to sink even deeper into their stretch, it was often painful for me to even get into the positions being demonstrated by the teacher. My inflexibility and my embarrassment of how bad I was at stretching led to me developing a hatred of even the idea of it.
Still, I couldn’t get away from feeling the effects of this aversion. When I was 17, the extreme tightness in my hamstrings led to me injuring my back. I had always been embarrassed of how limited my flexibility in my legs was, but to know I was so inflexible I had injured an entirely different part of my body was mortifying.
At the time I was a rower, and my last two seasons competing in the sport were being heavily disrupted by my injury, so although I had always hated stretching, each night I tried to dutifully follow the exercises I was told might help me recover. However, when I didn’t feel like I was seeing any results, I was pretty quick to give up on stretching. Why would I stick with this routine that was not only painful, but was something I was so bad at?Â
Unsurprisingly, my back pain didn’t go away. After almost 3 years after my initial injury, last summer I began attending physical therapy. While regularly attending these sessions, I felt a huge relief in my pain. A huge part of these sessions was stretching, and although I hated it, I would dutifully follow my assigned exercises during my sessions. Although my PT had very kindly given me a routine to continue following on my own once I returned to uni in the fall, just as I had in high school, I decided stretching was more painful than helpful and that I didn’t need to be following these assigned exercises, especially since my back had started feeling better.
However, the pain hadn’t gone away for good. Throughout the course of the year I would often find myself frustrated as the pain would return. At the beginning of last March I got particularly frustrated, I felt like if I walked too long, ran too hard, or even sat for too long my back pain flared up. Despite my frustrations, I still had a strong aversion to trying any of the stretches meant to make my back feel better. I still couldn’t associate stretching with anything other than discomfort.
Then one day, it really struck me that if my flexibility, or lack thereof, was limiting me so much in my everyday life at 20 years old, future me was in deep trouble. Additionally, I realized it was only going to get harder to make a change as time went on. I realized that if I wanted to take care of myself, I had to try to push past the embarrassment and frustrations I associated with stretching. I made it a priority to stretch every day, whether it was just for a few quick minutes on my own, or more ideally following a longer guided stretching video from Youtube.
It certainly wasn’t fun at first, the stretches felt hard and it was frustrating to watch the experts in the videos bend every which way, while I couldn’t even touch my toes without my hamstrings screaming at me. However, over the course of a few weeks, not only did the stretches become physically easier and relieve a lot of my back pain, but the prospect of stretching has seemed less and less daunting. I no longer associate stretching with an intense physical or mental discomfort.
Although I started trying to stretch every day as a means of achieving a physical goal, the experience has brought attention to my mental flexibility far more than I ever realized it would. Establishing these new routines has been a very helpful reminder to push myself mentally and emotionally, not only physically. As basic as the lesson is, it’s always helpful to get a tangible reminder to not immediately give up on the parts of life that, god-forbid, I’m not immediately good at, or the things that may feel uncomfortable at first. Just like stretching, those initially frustrating experiences can lead to a whole range of positive outcomes from sticking with them, even if the positive outcome is just the pride of knowing you did something to challenge yourself.