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We've spent the last few weeks talking about how chronic tightness often lives in the brain rather than the body — how muscle guarding and a blurry homunculus can make us feel stiff, stuck, and disconnected from our movement. If you haven’t had a chance to check out those posts, they will help give this one some important context.

This week I want to talk about what we can do to address feeling stuck in muscle guarding. The standard fitness solution to being stuck is generally to push harder. More reps. More weight. More range. But when your brain and your body have a failure to communicate, pushing harder can actually make you feel worse.

This post covers what it looks like when you do the opposite — and why it might be the most important training concept you've never heard of.

Before digging into this meaty subject… today I had a wonderful conversation with Nicole, the winner of July’s raffle for a 30 minute AMA with me. She is a dancer studying to be a PT so we had so much to talk about and I loved getting to know her and talking injury recovery, dance, and circus. All you have to do to enter August’s raffle is refer a friend or two to this mailing list. More referrals = more entries!

And now let’s get to it! For those of us interested in mobility, the neurological aspect of movement isn’t an afterthought, it is essential. So much of our range of motion is determined by our neurological system, not just the physical structures we are trying to move. Our training toolbox needs to include techniques for facilitating neurological changes, and that requires a shift in mindset and approach.

When we want to increase the brain’s ability to both listen to and communicate with the body, the strategy looks very different than a typical strength- or flexibility-focused exercise.

The universal model for driving strength and flexibility adaptations is called progressive overload. Progressive overload happens when we slowly add intensity—weight, speed, range, reps—in order to drive stimulus to the tissues that is just a bit beyond our current capacity. We need a bit of struggle.

Struggling is what causes a cascade of physiologic consequences—everything from hormonal surges to neural light shows to a bit of light remodeling—that create new capacities. We build muscle. We get stronger. We get bendier. Therefore, fitness is built around a model and culture of struggle.

No one can escape the “No Pain No Gain” ethos of fitness. It is plastered on walls and T-shirts and creatine supplements the world over. The problem is, it isn’t always what our body needs.

When our brain isn’t communicating with our body and our homunculus is blurry and we can’t organize our movement well, overload is the last thing we need. When you overload a disorganized body, panic ensues. Your body, operating without proper leadership from the brain, is just going to use whatever is at hand to get the job done. It doesn’t want to let you down, but it won’t feel good about it.

Imagine you are at your job and you aren’t really sure what you are doing. You can’t figure out the computer and the wifi is slow and your coworkers are snotty. Then your boss comes in and drops a massive pile of papers on your desk and tells you that you need to get this whole thing managed as fast as possible and the fate of the world depends on your performance. How well would you perform?

This is how your muscles feel when you try to overload them without making sure that your internal communications system is online. Physically, it means overuse of the easily available muscles and complete abandonment of the rest. Cascading imbalances lead to wobbly, stressed out joints and an unpleasantly high probability of injury. It can show up as knee joints that track weird, shoulders popping, tight necks and back spasms.

These symptoms can feel very confusing. You are doing everything right, showing up to work out regularly and trying to make sure that your form is correct. You are working hard! It can be very discouraging.

Some folks may decide that fitness just isn’t for them and give up. Others double down and throw on another weight plate just to show that stubborn meat suit who’s boss. It isn’t hard to end up traumatizing yourself to the point that muscle guarding kicks in, creating the kind of chronic tightness that makes you want to pound yourself with a meat tenderizer.

It feels like we need to do more. We are often told that we need to do more. But we actually need to do much, much less.

Progressive underloading (this is not a scientific term but it is making the rounds on social media and I like it) means taking that big giant pile of work off your body’s desk and focusing on the basics. We want to remove all the stress and pressure so that your body has a chance to figure itself out, improving that neurological communication that feeds information to and from the brain.

While this sounds simple enough, it is both mentally and physically quite challenging for people who are stuck in “try hard” mode. Mentally, underloading can feel humbling, defeating, frustrating, and like a huge step backwards. When we have been taught our whole lives that progress looks like ever more impressive feats of athleticism, the idea of removing stress can feel like failure.

Physically, underloading is actually weirdly challenging. When we remove the heavy loads and start to find the shy muscles, feel into the sad muscles, and move the stuck bits, it reveals all the parts of ourselves that we have neglected over the years. Suddenly you are shaking, cramping, and feeling struggle in a way that we associate with “weakness”.

It allows us to feel the areas and ranges we have been neglecting. It makes us honest about our capacities. And it helps us heal.

Last week I wrote about the use of somatic movement practices to address chronic tightness resulting from muscle guarding. Progressive underloading could be seen as a form of somatic movement in that you are not focused on performance metrics, just on deepening your experience of the movement.

It is useful to practice progressive underloading using a movement that feels very familiar but has some sort of hitch or sticking point, or a stretch where the muscle feels particularly tight and grippy. Then remove almost all of the challenge by removing weight, changing the relationship with gravity, decreasing the range, or all of the above.

Mentally, it helps to remove all the pressure to make the movement productive or impressive, and just notice how the movement feels and where you stick, or grip, or feel the desire to speed up or stop. I find it helpful to take long slow breaths and even close your eyes to bring the focus as internal as possible.

As you move through your reps, the challenge is to ask your body to put in less and less effort. How relaxed can you be while doing this movement?

What I’ve often experienced myself, and observed with clients, is that progressively underloading enables us to find the parts of the body that haven’t been communicating well with the brain. As the big, loud, muscles relax, the quiet muscles have a chance to make their “voices” heard. You may start to feel the shaking, stuttering, surprised feeling of a shy little muscle getting a chance to grow and learn.

I had a client with hip flexors like bridge cables. Whatever exercise she was doing, her hip flexors were there to do the job. Squats? Hip flexors! Crunches? Hip Flexors! Glute bridges? Hip flexors! Math Problems? Hip flexors!

This same client claimed that nothing on this earth could get her to feel her glutes working. She lifted weights and did yoga and tried every glute exercise on Instagram and still couldn’t feel her glutes kick on. She kept loading her weights heavier and heavier and trying harder exercises, even as she was developing ongoing lower back pain and her hips popped and creaked.

It took me a while, but I finally talked her into taking a couple of weeks off of all her heavy workouts and indulging me in trying some progressive underloading. I had her start with the world’s tiniest glute bridge, laying on her back with her lower legs supported by a mat and the hips and knees at 90 degrees. We tried a tiny overcoming isometric hold (the subject of next week’s post) and I challenged her to use as little effort as possible.

At first there was much irritation and grumbling and a fair amount of very active hip flexors trying to kick in. But after several rounds of underloading, deep breathing, and trying less and less hard all of a sudden we got some lower glute and hamstring twitches. It started out very, very shaky and intermittent, but over a couple of weeks she was getting consistent glute and hamstring engagement without excessive hip flexor participation.

It took quite a while to build on this foundation and translate it to more challenging movements, but once her brain and glutes started talking, we could build real communication. We were able to shift her movement patterns and gradually build up to her impressive workouts again, but this time with the whole team of hip muscles showing up to the party.

In briefly recounting this process it’s easy to downplay how challenging it can be. Performers and those of us who are deeply invested in our movement practices can feel emotionally reluctant to really dive into progressive underloading. It means leaning into your soft spots, and hanging out with them for a while.

It is my hope that, in promoting this knowledge and sharing it with as many people as possible, that we can learn to celebrate the process of underloading as a necessary training tool, just like all the difficult, sexy stuff we post on our feeds.

Want to go deeper?

Further reading:

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This November I'm co-teaching a week-long flexibility and mobility retreat in Oaxaca, Mexico with Kerri Krisinski. Progressive underloading, somatic movement, and hands-on coaching in a small group setting, designed for women who are lifelong movers and not about to give it up now.

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Happy Bendings,

Kristina