Those of us who pay attention to our physical fitness and well-being are typically concerned with maintaining our flexibility.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re 36 or 63. Hitting the gym on a regular basis (in conjunction with any sports we play) is generally regarded as a fundamental complement to our fitness routine in order to gain strength, speed and endurance – and working out certainly helps build up our flexibility and make us less prone to injuries.
However, just don’t confuse flexibility with pliability. There’s a lot more to the latter than the former, as many top athletes know.
Being flexible means being able to touch your toes. Pliability is about building muscles that are supple and resilient enough to absorb and disperse external forces and operate efficiently and with minimum stress.
Take It From an Expert
Tom Brady, the famed former quarterback (he spent 20 seasons with the New England Patriots before joining the Tampa Bay Bucaneers) is a passionate believer in pliability and contends that it’s fundamental to his longevity in football.
When muscles retain their optimal function and range of motion, you build resilience to injury and perform at your best.
The Path of Least Resistance?
What makes us less agile as we age? Lack of pliability. According to Tom Brady, about 50% of his training sessions are devoted to pliability exercises.
Pliability exercises tend to focus more on work using resistance bands and less on weight training. Once only found in physiotherapy clinics and in the storeroom of your local health center, more and more gyms are including resistance bands in their repertoire of equipment. They’ve acknowledged the benefits and the versatility of them for their clients.
We’ve Got Some
Resistance bands have become popular in recent years for the simple reason that they take up little to no storage space and are an easily accessible way to work out from the comfort of your own home. When our gym shut its doors during the pandemic, we ordered some resistance bands online to ensure we’d have a means to exercise here at home. We still use them today!
With resistance bands, the tension just gets progressively heavier as the bands get stretched. It’s that easy. With just one band, you can change the amount of resistance you put onto your muscles simply by changing the length of the band.
And this, increasing numbers of experts agree, is the right stimulus we need for our bodies to adapt and change – and become more pliable.
A Healthy Combination
Both weights and resistance bands are great for building up your strength – and gaining a bunch of muscle along the way – but resistance bands help you to do this more steadily, more pliably, and you are at less risk of being in any pain or experiencing an injury with them.
The benefits of pliability exercises include:
- Waking up the muscles and the nervous system.
- Pliability focused self-massage and foam rolling boosts range of motion.
- A post-workout pliability session helps prevent soreness, encourages stretching and enables a quicker recovery.
Words of Wisdom
If you’re still not convinced, here’s a great quote from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu:
Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus, whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.
Pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?