Andrew Huberman

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, we are going to discuss the science and practice of flexibility and stretching.

The important thing that I'd like you to know is that flexibility and the process of stretching and getting more flexible involves three major components.

Neural, meaning of the nervous system, muscular, muscles, and connective tissue.

Connective tissue is the stuff that surrounds the neural stuff and the muscular stuff, although it's all kind of weaved together and braided together in complicated ways.

So here's a key thing that everyone should know, whether or not you're talking about flexibility or not.

Your nervous system controls your muscles.

It's what gets your muscles to contract.

So within your spinal cord, you have a category of neurons, nerve cells, that are called motor neurons.

Those neurons release a chemical.

That chemical is called acetylcholine.

The release of acetylcholine from these nerve cells, these neurons, onto the muscles causes the muscles to contract.

And when muscles contract, they are able to move

by way of changing the length of the muscle, adjusting the function of connective tissue like tendons and ligaments.

Now, within the muscles themselves, there are nerve connections.

And these are nerve connections that arise from a different set of neurons in the spinal cord that we call sensory neurons.

These spindle connections

within the muscle that wrap around the muscle fibers, sense the stretch of those muscle fibers.

So now we have two parts to the system that I've described.