Episode 38: 9 Tips to Relieve Tight Muscles

Trainer Tips

Feb 17

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Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, Hey there! 👋 I'm Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, I give 9 tips for relieving tight, stiff muscles.

Muscle tightness is a common issue that can be caused by various factors like exercise, stress, poor posture, and inactivity. In this podcast, I discuss effective strategies to relieve muscle tightness. Key recommendations include prioritizing a proper warm-up with moderate-intensity cardio and dynamic stretches, using self-myofascial release techniques like foam rolling and lacrosse balls, staying hydrated, maintaining a nutritious diet, incorporating movement throughout the day, ensuring adequate rest and sleep, and utilizing heat or cold therapy. Additionally, seeking professional help for massage or assisted stretching and addressing the root causes of muscle tightness (such as poor posture or exercise technique) are also super important.

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Jayd (00:00):
Muscle tightness. It doesn't have to slow you down, it doesn't have to hold you back, and it's not something that you just have to push through and deal with, right? If you're experiencing tightness in your muscles chronically, then that's just a sign that there's something that needs to be addressed. Welcome in. My name is Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I am a personal trainer and health coach, and today we're going to be talking about what to do if you have tight muscles. Now, regardless of whether you exercise or not, tight muscles is probably something you've experienced in your life, and it's probably something that you're going to experience at some point in the future in your life, right? If you have muscles, they're probably going to get tight, and there's a lot of different reasons why our muscles get tight. They can get tight as a response to exercise.
(00:53)
When you work your muscles and you challenge them sometimes as a reaction to getting challenged as part of the recovery process, they will tighten up. Sometimes we get tight muscles because we are stressed out. I know I definitely have experienced that sometimes you experience tightness from not exercising enough, from not getting up and getting moving. If you spend a lot of time sitting still or laying down and not moving very much, you likely have some tightness in your muscles if you have poor posture or poor movement patterns, bad alignment, that also can make tight muscles worse. It also can lead to tight muscles. It's something that we're all going to experience from time to time, and it is a normal part of just being alive. It's also especially a normal, normal part of exercising. So what we're going to talk about today is what to do if you have tight muscles.
(01:50)
There are a couple different things that you can do, and we're going to go through all of them, and I am going to show a little bit of demonstration on some of the exercises that you can do to help loosen up your tight muscles. There is a post that goes with this podcast topic called How to Relieve Tight Muscles. It is available on my website, jaydigains.com. In the membership site, if you scroll down to the training tips, you'll see the post called How to Relieve Tight Muscles. Click on that, and there's a written description of everything that we're going to talk about today. In the episode, there's also links to YouTube video tutorials of how to do different exercises, how to foam roll, how to stretch, and many other links that you can use to take this topic a little bit further. So go to jaydigains.com or Jaydharrisonfitness.com and sign up for the membership.
(02:43)
Okay, so let's talk about how to relieve tight muscles. First of all, before I move forward for the Twitch chat, I want to ask you guys, what muscle group or area of your body do you find most often you have tightness in? Is there an area of your body that you just kind of, it's a recurring thing. More often than not, you have tightness, upper traps. Oh, yeah, yeah. Now do you think that that's from exercise or from stress or from both or from sleeping? Weird. What do you think it's from these days? Exercise used to be from sleep. Okay, so your upper traps are tight from exercise, you think. Are you doing a lot of farmer caries or rows or deadlifts? Are you hunching your shoulders when you train? Because tightness can also come from sometimes doing an exercise with weird posture used to, you don't have as much of a problem anymore.
(03:39)
Probably getting better with your form. Yeah. Okay. Well, the traps is a super common area for people to experience tightness, and it can be from your exercise, it can be from sleeping weird, like sleeping with your head crooked, a little weird. It can also be from sitting in front of a computer with your shoulders hunched and rolled forward. When we're stressed, we tend to scrunch up our shoulders like this subconsciously. So that's a super, super common area for people to get really, really tight is the upper traps. That's that neck and upper shoulder area. Another area that people tend to experience a lot of tightness is the hips, especially the hip flexors. That's the muscle along the front of your hips here that takes your knee up like this. And that's a lot of that is because we sit in chairs or we spend a lot of our days seated.
(04:31)
Another really common area for tightness to occur is your hamstrings in the back of your thighs for the same reason, because we spend a lot of our days seated in a chair with your knees bent, and so that just keeps the hamstrings in a shortened position. And then another area, a lot of people experience tightnesses. The calves, oh my gosh, almost everybody I ever train has tight calves, and that is, again, likely do to sitting all day. If you do a lot of walking though or running, you probably have tight calves. Or if you do a sport like boxing where you're on your toes a lot and you're having to really keep your heel off the ground if you sprint, that can also cause tight calves. And the problem with having tightness, usually we're seeing tightness mainly in the back of the body. And the problem with that, you might not necessarily know that you have tightness in the muscles, but you may experience pain somewhere along that chain.
(05:32)
You may have trouble turning your head side to side without pain or crooking your head side to side. You may experience some pain if you go to reach for your toes or maybe you can't even reach for your toes and you don't realize it's because you have so much tightness in the posterior chain. That's the backside of your body. Also, if you have plantar fasciitis, which is that pain that a lot of people experience in the arch of their foot or on the bottom of their feet, that more often than not is caused by tightness somewhere in the backside of your body. It can originate in your hamstrings in the back of your thighs. If you have some trigger points or some tightness in your hamstrings, that tightness tends to kind of accumulate and pull on the entire posterior chain all the way down the legs.
(06:20)
And so you may feel the pain in your foot, but the actual problem and source of the pain may be the tightness in the hamstrings. Other things that you might experience if you have tightness is pain in your joints when you are exercising. For example, another really common problem, if you have tight hip flexors, you might also have tight quadriceps. And for a lot of people, after they warm up and they start to squat, if they've never had knee problems, they may still experience some pain, especially in the top of the knee when they first start to warm up their squats. More often than not, what I found is that is because their quadriceps are tight or their hip flexors are tight, and that tightness in the hip flexor is kind of migrating down and causing the quadricep to pull on the knee. So whenever you go down into your squat, because the quadriceps are so tight, they're pulling on the knee.
(07:16)
So you may feel sometimes pain in the joint shoulder. Pain is also a really good example of this. A really common problem for a lot of lifters is having a tight bicep tendon and you know, have a tight bicep tendon. If you feel it's really tight and you open up your arm like this straight out, and that tightness in the bicep tendon can be felt as shoulder pain when you go to do something like bench press, right? So tightness is a major problem for a lot of people when it comes to training. And if you ignore it and you just push through the pain, which I never recommend that you do, but if you just push through the pain, you can end up pulling a muscle and straining it or greatly injuring either your muscles or your joints. You never want to be feeling pain while you're exercising.
(08:07)
It's okay to feel like the muscles are burning, of course, but you don't want to feel sharp pain. So please, if you notice anything like that while you're exercising, stop what you're doing and troubleshoot. Try to figure out what's going on. Figuring out whether it's muscle tightness is usually my first go-to. So here's what we can do. If you have muscle tightness, it's causing pain, or you can just feel the tightness in your muscles. Number one, this will help to relieve some tension. It will also help to prevent your muscles from being super tight at the beginning of your workout, is to prioritize a proper warmup. Number one, warm up properly. I always recommend doing five to 10 minutes of some kind of moderate intensity. Usually steady state cardiovascular exercise. This can be something as simple as hopping on a treadmill and walking at a moderate pace for five to 10 minutes.
(08:58)
Okay, this does a couple of things. It raises your core temperature. You don't want to be exercising with cold muscles. It also helps to get the synovial fluid in your joints more viscous so that they can lubricate and protect your joints from injury. Also, as your core temperature raises and you're using your muscles, it's getting some blood flow to those muscles, which is going to help to loosen them up and make them more limber. Getting up and moving before you actually train is a great way to relieve tight muscles and to prevent them from being tight during your workout and afterwards. Also, after you do five to 10 minutes of moderate intensity cardio, you should also take some time to stretch your muscles. I don't necessarily mean to do static stretches. Static stretches, I usually prefer for people to do at the end of their workout because static stretching where you're holding the stretch for 20 to 60 seconds can cool you down.
(09:49)
You don't want to cool down during your warmup, right? So what I recommend number two is making sure to do dynamic stretches. Dynamic stretches at the beginning of your workout, after you do your cardiovascular warmup, will help to loosen up your muscles if you have any moderate tightness. Doing things like opening up your arms open and close shoulder circles, leg swings, forward and back, side to side torso twists. Going at a controlled pace and just bringing the joints through their full range of motion is a great way to help loosen up tight muscles. Now, when you're doing this, when you're doing your dynamic stretches at the beginning of your workout, you may find that you're able to loosen up muscles that were tight before and they might feel better, but there may be some muscles that are a little stubborn and they need a little bit more attention to loosen up For those, what I do recommend is taking a moment to do some static stretches, slow the stretches down and get a little bit deeper into it.
(10:47)
Just try not to spend more than two to three minutes doing any kind of static stretching at the beginning of your workout, because again, that can cool your heart rate down. That can bring down your core temperature, and we want to make sure that your body stays primed to train. Now, if you've done that, if you've done a warmup, done static stretching, you've done dynamic stretching, and then you've done static stretching in a muscle is still really, really tight. Another thing that you can do is called myofascial release, self myofascial release. Myofascial release is often the way that we often do this is foam rolling. Foam rolling is probably the most popular way to do myofascial release. And what this involves is putting pressure on the muscles. It's kind of like doing a massage on the muscles where you use a foam roller. You put whatever type muscle you have, say your quadriceps, and you're going to set your body on top of the foam roller so that the foam roller is underneath the muscle that is tight.
(11:46)
And you're going to just let your body weight sit on the foam roller and move your body over the foam roller over the affected muscle. And putting this pressure on the muscle and rolling it forward and back or side to side can help to loosen up tight muscles that are a little bit stubborn after you've tried doing cardio and doing the stretching. You can also use other types of tools like lacrosse balls. I think the lacrosse ball works really well for those really small, hard to reach or very deep muscles in your back or in your chest. I think I have one actually, hold on. Lemme, here we go. So this is a lacrosse ball. They're really, really cheap, and I use this a lot of times on my, I tend to have a tight chest and bicep tendon area, so this kind of affects me in my bench pressing and in my shoulder pressing.
(12:37)
So lacrosse ball, you push it across the muscle that's tight and oh my God, my pec is really tight right now, so I can feel that. And what you do is you just roll it over the muscle that's tight and you'll feel a sensation of tightness. It's not a comfortable feeling. Myofascial release foam rolling. It does kind of hurt, but it's not the type of hurt when you're going to get injured, right? It's very different from that sharp pain that you might feel in your joints. It's more of the discomfort of someone squeezing a muscle that's tight. But if you do that, you foam roll or you use a lacrosse ball, put some pressure on a tight muscle for between 30 to 60 seconds at a time, either pushing it down and holding it there for 30 to 60 seconds or foam rolling around it or rolling the lacrosse ball around it.
(13:27)
That should help to loosen up tight muscles. The idea of the self myofascial release is that it helps to break up adhesions in the muscles. It also helps to promote the muscles to elongate. So the way that our muscles work is according to the sliding filament theory, our muscles kind of work like this when they contract the filaments slide over each other, and that's how the muscle gets shortened, right? So my bicep right now is super long. It's elongated, and if I want to contract it now, it's shortened, right? And that's because the filaments are sliding over each other. So sometimes the muscles when they're tight, they kind of get stuck in the middle like this where they're not able, or parts of the muscle are not able to fully elongate. And so sometimes when you put pressure on top of that, it helps to stimulate release so that the muscle can fully elongate.
(14:24)
That's the idea. Now, it's not really certain whether it actually you're able to actually perform release of the fascia. There's a little bit of debate on whether you can foam roll or lacrosse ball your way to actually loosen up the fascia of the muscles. But anecdotally, everybody that I've worked with who's had tight muscles, knee pain while they're squatting shoulder pain while they're benching, and then it's because of tight muscles and we've used some kind of a foam roller or a lacrosse ball to actually put pressure on those muscles, it helps. It does help. We're just not really sure exactly why it helps, but it does help. So that is a number three thing that you can do to help yourself get through and relieve tight muscles. Now in the post, in my membership site on this topic, I have two videos in the post on how to foam roll for the different parts of your body.
(15:26)
There's a separate video. There's one that will guide you through foam rolling your legs, and it's a short little routine for foam rolling over your quadriceps, your glutes, your hamstrings, your calves, and then there's a separate video for foam rolling your upper body, your back, your shoulders, the front of your shoulders, et cetera. So if you want a little bit of guidance, head over to jaydigains.com and go to the training tips section and you'll see how to relieve tight muscles. So number four, another thing that you can do to help give yourself some relief from tight muscles is to stay hydrated and properly feed yourself. When we are not hydrated, when we don't have enough water in our bodies, that can cause muscle spasms, that can cause muscle tightness and that tightness can be so stubborn, it doesn't matter if you've warmed up, it doesn't matter if you've stretched, it doesn't matter if you foam rolled, if you are not hydrated, you're going to have some stubborn tightness in your muscles.
(16:21)
So that's a really, I mean, honestly, I maybe should have put that as number one. Number one is stay hydrated, right? Because it is just so important for so many things. Remember, our body is mostly made of water, and if you're not drinking enough water, you're going to have problems across the board. But among those problems is you're more likely to have tightness in your muscles. So make sure that you are drinking enough water every day and to know whether or not you're drinking enough water. Check your pee when you go to the bathroom. If your pee is really dark, then that means that you are not hydrated enough. Your pee should be see-through a little bit colored right, not completely clear, but on the clearer side, right? So check the toilet to make sure that you are hydrated enough and make sure also that you're nourishing your body with the right kinds of foods.
(17:08)
We talk about the healthy plate model all the time because it really is one of the easiest ways that you can give yourself the nutrition that your body needs to perform its best and to feel its best. Make sure that you're nourishing your body with the right kinds of foods. Foods like vegetables and fruit, and then whole grain products like whole wheat, bread, oats, et cetera. These things are anti-inflammatory. They will help to reduce inflammation in your body, which often correlates with or causes tightness in the muscles. So if you can get a maximum amount of vegetables into your diet, you are going to reduce greatly reduce the amount of tightness that you feel in your muscles. Also, don't forget that vegetables and fruit are hydrating, right? They have a lot of water in them, so eating plenty of vegetables and fruit, especially fresh vegetables and fruit, will also help you with hydration.
(18:09)
You also want to make sure that you prioritize magnesium rich foods like spinach, nuts and bananas because those can help to promote relaxation in the muscles. Make sure that you're also drinking plenty of electrolytes as well. If you tend to work out really, really hard, or if you work out for longer than an hour, it's probably not going to be enough to just drink water. You want to make sure that you're also getting in plenty of electrolytes. If you're eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, you're likely getting the electrolytes that you need for your body without having to add anything or drinking a sports drink. But you could also try a sports drink like Pedialyte or drink coconut water. Okay? So just keep an eye on your electrolytes. And then number five, move throughout the day. CNN, I think it was 2019, they posted this study and they labeled this when they published these findings.
(19:03)
They said, sitting is the new smoking. And they were talking about a study that showed that if you spend the majority of your day seated, even if you work out, even if you work out, you're still at a huge risk of developing health problems. So even if you out a couple of times a week, it's not really going to help you with muscle tightness and soreness. If you spend the rest of your time seated or sedentary, it really is best for you to try to get up and moving as much as you possibly can. Remember, our bodies are built for movement, so they look and they feel their best when we get plenty of movement. And this doesn't have to be really hard exercise. It can be something as simple as getting up and taking a lap around the office or getting up and just tidying up your space a little bit for three to five minutes at a time.
(19:56)
Just getting up and getting moving little bit by little bit throughout the day and puncturing your day with little tiny activity breaks will help to loosen up your muscles and keep them from getting too tight. This is especially true after you've worked out. Okay, so number six, and I know some of you're going to be like, oh, when I say this, but you really need to prioritize recovery with rest and sleep, which you might be thinking like, wait, didn't you just tell me to keep moving? Yes, but you got to prioritize your sleep. A lot of us, and I'm guilty of this too, stay up way too late way later than you should, than we should, and then we still have to wake up early for work or something. It is so important to get plenty of sleep, as much sleep as your body needs, especially if you train really hard.
(20:48)
Remember, you do not build any muscle in the gym. We don't build muscle in the gym during your workouts. You're actually breaking muscle down. You're causing damage to your body. It is when you are sleeping, if you're getting good sleep, that your body actually repairs the damage tissue damage to tissue and makes it stronger. So if you are not sleeping enough, then you are not going to be yielding the gains that you've been working for. Also, if you don't sleep enough, if you don't rest enough, you're going to feel like shit. You're likely going to have a lot more tightness in your muscles than you would if you actually prioritized getting enough sleep. I know this is really hard because some people can't help it. Some people are bad sleepers. This is something that hurts my clients who are going through perimenopause. Oh my gosh, this is, honestly, I think this is probably the worst part of perimenopause because I got out of the clients that I've taught that I am teaching, who are my clients who are going through it right now?
(21:52)
That is the one symptom of perimenopause that I think everybody will say no. That is the worst part of it. Worse than the heat flashes, hot flashes worse than the acne. That sometimes happens, worse than the mood swings is it's the fucking sleep. Because without enough sleep, you could go crazy, dude, and it just affects everything. When you don't sleep enough, it makes you want to snack more, right? Because your body's like, I need energy. So it's harder to stick to a fat loss diet when you're not sleeping enough. You're likely to, of course, in the topic of today's discussion, you're going to have more tightness in your muscles, probably more aches and pains, more inflammation if you're not sleeping enough. So it is something that we want to prioritize. Now, in terms of how to solve it, if you're going through perimenopause or if you have an issue with sleep, talk to your doctor.
(22:50)
There are sleep studies that you can do. Sometimes people have issues where they can't actually breathe when they're sleeping. They need to get a CPA machine. Young people, it's not just an old person's problem, and it's not just an unfit person's problem. One of my very, very good friends, who is the most muscular person I know, who's the fittest person that I know has to sleep with a CPAP machine, right? So sleep apnea, perimenopause, drinking, too much caffeine. I'm definitely guilty of that. If you're not sleeping well, try to really prioritize figuring out why, pinpoint the problem and prioritize solving it. And if it's something like you're drinking too much caffeine, or maybe you're eating too close to bedtime, or maybe you need to take medicine, maybe you need to talk to your doctor, of course, before taking any kind of supplement like melatonin, but prioritize that.
(23:43)
Talk to your doctor about it. Go to a sleep study. So getting enough sleep is really, really key for many reasons. But especially if you have type muscles. And then also, this is one of my favorite tips. Number seven, try heat or cold therapy. Whenever I train my muscles really, really hard, I have a few muscles that I just know are going to get really tight because of old injuries. If you have an old injury, it's likely that that muscle is going to always kind of pop up and give you some problems for a long time. So one of the things that I do after I've done a really hard leg day or deadlifts, I know that my hip flexor is probably going to get really, really tight on my right side. So when I go to bed while I'm reading and winding down, I put a heating pad on that muscle and I have it there for 20 to 30 minutes, and that helps to loosen the muscle up.
(24:42)
So heat like a heating pad or taking a hot bath is a great way to help the blood flow kind of circulate through your body, which can help to flush out the cellular waste from those processes that are happening to repair the muscle tissue. And the cold therapy can help as well. If you're just like, oh my God, these muscles are aching. They're not only tight, but they're just like they're aching. Cold can help reduce inflammation. So you can alternate between heat and cold therapy. A cold compress, hot compress is a great way to kind of help loosen up your muscles. More often than not. I find that the heat helps to loosen the muscles if they're tight. The cold is more, if you are, it's kind of throbbing and it's kind of painful if it's painful because you want to reduce the inflammation. Number eight is you can get a massage or try assisted stretching.
(25:40)
The area that I live in, Raleigh, North Carolina has a ton of chiropractor offices and physical therapy offices that offer a huge variety of services, including massage assisted stretching. And I do have one client who she has a lot of stress in her life, and so she goes once, sometimes even twice a week to a chiropractor who helps her to stretch because she's also hypermobile hypermobile, meaning that she is very, very flexible and it's hard for her alone by herself to stretch many of the muscles in her body to the point where they need to be stretched in order to get relief for tightness. So massage or assisted stretching is a really good option if you're having trouble consistently with tight muscles and none of these other things are helping. So the main thing here is you want to address the root cause. Like I said before, if you have tightness in one area of your body, you want to make sure that you are starting to become aware and thinking about what might be causing that tightness.
(26:49)
Because if you chronically tight, say in your hamstrings and you stretch, you foam roll, you do all the things, and it's just this chronic problem that keeps occurring and happening, then you might want to take a look at what might be causing that thing. Again, tightness in the hamstrings is a lot of times caused by spending too much time seated. And so if you can identify that as the cause, then you can actually give yourself something to help reduce that tightness by getting up and getting moving throughout the day, spending less time seated. Sometimes chronic tightness in your muscles may be due to having poor posture or poor alignment, and you may be making it worse by exercising with poor alignment or poor posture. And this problem can just compound again and again over time. So you want to address the root cause. Make sure that you are taking a video of yourself when you're exercising, especially if you're doing an exercise that you feel tightness or pain or discomfort while you're doing that exercise.
(27:53)
Because if you do feel that and it's something that's chronically happening, there may be something off with your technique. There likely is something off with your technique, your posture, your alignment, or your movement patterns. So you want to take video of that and analyze it according to what the standards of good technique are. And again, I have published to my membership site technique tips and guides for troubleshooting different movement patterns like troubleshooting your bench press, troubleshooting your Romanian, deadlift, your squat. So take video of yourself, analyze your movement patterns against what these recommendations are for how to do these exercises correctly so that you can kind of diagnose what is going wrong and fix it in your technique. And if you need help, seek help, right? That's why personal trainers exist. That's why I'm here. You can always post a video of your exercise. If you're not sure and you need some feedback, you can post it to My Discord if you're one of my Twitch subscribers or a member on my website, or if you're one of my clients, you can post to the Technique Reviews channel and I'll take a look at it on Technique Tuesdays and give you some feedback.
(29:04)
So try to address what the root cause is, especially if it's something that's like recurring for you. So muscle tightness, it doesn't have to slow you down, it doesn't have to hold you back, and it's not something that you just have to push through and deal with. If you're experiencing tightness in your muscles chronically, then that's just a sign that there's something that needs to be addressed. I hope that these tips help you to think about addressing any tightness in your muscles that you may be feeling. And if you have any questions or if you're experiencing something like this and you want my take on it, please feel free to reach out. You can chat in the chat while I'm streaming on Twitch, or you can again join my membership, leave comments on the posts or ask your questions in my Coaching Corner Discord server. So I'm here to help. And yeah, with that's it. That's the podcast episode for today. Thanks guys for joining me. Appreciate you. Let me know what questions you have. I will talk to you again soon.