The TuneUp Program

Passive stretching depends on the energy of other muscles to generate tension in both the muscle and connective tissue fibres. It is important that the direction of the force creating this tension is as close to possible to the line of the muscle, between the distal and proximal tendons

In this stretch I'm using the muscles in my left arm to pull my right elbow back. This creates a passive tension in the tricep muscle along the line indicated by the white arrow and in the lateral shoulder rotators (green arrow). This direction is important because collagen fibres are embedded into the connective tissue according to the forces that are applied to it and we want this direction to be consistent with the direction of the muscle fibres.