Therapy thoughts (20/6/25) - Tension is for adaptation, relaxation is for performance!

This is one of my silly little sayings I use when I teach! Maybe I will turn it into a T shirt 🤣.

The rehab world is dominated by the idea of creating tension in tissues, this tension then leads to adaptations in size, strength and hopefully also tolerance of tissues. Although its worth pointing out capacity and tolerance are not one and the same thing (which will be another post!)

This is great btw! The loads applied and tensions that are created drive adaptations, think about hypertrophy and time under tension.

But we may need to separate the idea of tension & performance here.

Maybe tension is not so good for performance! If you hit a great serve in tennis, land a great punch or drive down the fairway, often this comes from being relaxed. In fact, you often hear “they got tight” or “tense” when this usually relaxed flowing motion does not work so well!

Same might be true of bending down to pick something up or lifting up our arm to reach. If its heavy then tension is great, but in everyday life then perhaps not so much if it’s the 90% of what we pick up in life that doesn’t require much tension/strength.

Tension actually might be associated with pain. When we have pain, we often also have co-contraction and muscle guarding. We see this in the hamstrings, quads, shoulder and trunk. This co-contraction helps to protect us (when adaptive) by minimising external motion through increasing internal tension. Hodges wrote about this back in 2011 with his paper “Moving differently in pain: A new theory to explain the adaptation to pain”

For some this may go back to normal, others make no difference, but for some could be part of the on-going problem.

How does this play into the internal chemistry of our tissues? Is the normal metabolic function disrupted leading to tissue ischemia and activation of receptors like TRVP1?

So rehab may also be about restoring normal, natural & free flowing movement as much as driving tissue adaptations. Slow, tense & co-contracted, as we often are in the gym loading it up, might not be the adaptation we require! In fact, for some, could it perpetuate the problem?

Gifford used the  “thoughtless, fearless movement” which I really like. This for me is often the aim with many folk suffering from back pain.

This doesn’t mean tension is bad, relaxation is good or vice versa. It’s a lot like loading, we don’t want to over or underload, instead choose the APPROPRIATE setting for the task.