The Connection between Strength, Flexibility, and Balance
Me, still on the office floor, after an intense yoga workout. Lausanne, Switzerland. June 4, 2021.
Years upon years, I ran and boxed and did hard-core aerobic exercise of one kind and another every day. And yes, I do mean every day.
Stretching? Too slow. Too boring. Let’s be honest: Too painful as well. Especially after years of building a hard carapace of stiffness from my muscles through to my joints and tendons.
Without realizing it, I’d ensconced myself into a lobster-like form.
I wished I had more flexibility, but I didn’t want to put in the work to get there. I hadn’t realized how badly my lack of flexibility had affected my balance and posture until they’d affected them enough to cause me to nearly topple stiffly after a slight jostling.
And let’s not talk about my inability to put on shoes or pants unless fully braced by a wall or another support.
No matter. I continued forward until, just as all the wise ones said it would, my years of dogged hard-core activity without a counterbalance of work on my strength and flexibility struck me down with a knee so tight and tender that I could barely walk on it and couldn’t sleep through the night without waking up due to the aching.
(And yes, anyone who knows me won’t need me to confess further that I continued to run on the problematic knee until it effectively gave out on me two miles from home one morning.)
Voilà, an unplanned, extended break from the hard-core fitness pounding—self-imposed physically, if not mentally or emotionally.
Forced to Stretch (and Thinking of Fettuccine)
I’d thought a few weeks of sitting out the running bit would do the trick. No luck: A short four-miler about eight weeks from my complete take-down had me back at square one for knee instability and pain.
Resigned to a longer break from running, I went for long walks instead. (No, I didn’t add stretching to this routine. Review the above notes around “boring” and “painful.”)
In truth, long walks did my body and soul a good turn, especially at the start of the coronavirus epidemic, which began around this time (and during which just getting outside helped my morale). I’d even say that the rhythm and pace of walking soothed me emotionally more than running ever did. Turns out that you notice so much more when you move more slowly and focus less on the workout and more on the world around you. (Who knew? Oh yeah—lots of people.)
But then winter in Europe arrived, bringing its cold, damp, and dark.
Though I doggedly kept to long walks where I could, the weather change forced me—finally, and at last resort—to turn toward indoor workouts, mostly in the form of high-intensity interval training sessions and the aforementioned dreaded, flexibility-intensive yoga workouts, all conduced in the cocoon of my home office, mostly while lying on the floor. (Anyone who has wondered why I don’t have anything on the wall behind me for video calls now knows the truth: That wall bears the brunt of my body-bracing needs for yoga. Putting a picture there would just bring disaster.)
Before I got down to it (literally and figuratively, as I now know my floor better than I’d ever thought I would), I’d thought stretching meant flopping your body in various directions, something like how fettuccine noodles can fold over onto and around themselves in every direction, with no strain to the pasta.
So that’s what I tried. I flopped my body in different directions, assuming that eventually, with enough flopping, it’d go more smoothly somehow.
Physical Strength, Flexibility, and Balance Intertwine
This continued until a yoga instructor or two broke through my obsessive thoughts about how long I’d have to keep doing this pose and how much it hurt and how much I hated yoga with pointers on aligning bones as part of the setup for certain stretches and poses, illustrating how better structuring the position of the skeleton would make certain physical shapes more possible—and how you must use your muscles to rotate the bones within them to get the skeleton positioned just right.
Further, how certain muscles need to get stronger to enable the stretching of complementary muscles, tendons, and ligaments.
And the final touch of illumination: That we achieve balance only through greater overall strength and flexibility combined.
In other words, unless I had more muscular strength that I could employ, I’d never improve my flexibility. Only with more flexibility could I effectively achieve the movements needed to further strengthen other muscles that would—wait for it—allow greater flexibility. And only with equilibrium across physical strength and flexibility vectors would I achieve better balance.
Does this seem obvious to everyone else? It sure didn’t seem obvious to me.
In a way, these a-ha moments brought an element of disappointment. I realized that achieving better flexibility and balance would require a longer, more stepwise process than I’d expected.
Also, in a follow-on light-bulb moment that had its own element of depression mixed in, I realized that all my years of working out in what I’d considered a pretty advanced and hard-core way had left me physically weak and wretched, rather than the opposite.
Facing the facts and determined to improve, I spent months assessing my different muscle groups, identifying weak spots, and forcing myself through grueling strength-training and muscle-elongation workouts, again and again, day after day. I worked on hamstrings, quadriceps, calves, groin, back, shoulders, chest, core from all angles (including between the ribs, where I hadn’t before realized that muscles existed), ankles, and beyond.
And as I got more flexible—because, by golly, the strength training worked—I realized where I needed to get stronger. And as I got stronger, I realized I’d grown even more flexible.
In stretching, I realized that—just as the yoga instructors pointed out—I never could truly get into a real stretch or accomplish anything requiring balance without intense engagement of one or more muscle groups. Due to this, even after what I’d considered a mainly stretching-focused workout, rather than a strength-building session—my body felt sore.
Think the a-ha moments have stopped?
Not quite.
Strength, Balance, and Flexibility beyond the Physical
Because in musing on the connection between strength and flexibility and balance in my body, I realized that the link between strength and flexibility applies to nearly every other aspect of life, too.
The more flexibly we think, the more agility we use in assessing information, situations, and problems, the stronger and more balanced our results. True professionally, societally, and interpersonally (and probably beyond).
Professionally—whether in terms of an entire corporation or an individual role or career—we are stronger when we have more balance and flexibility in our approach.
Example: A European study of over one hundred entrepreneurs found that a group coached to apply “scientific thinking” principles in executing their business plans, viewing every aspect as theory that required experiments to support or refute, averaged about 40 percent higher revenue—and in about half the time—as the control group.
Why? In thinking as scientists with theories and hypotheses to test, they didn’t have nearly as much emotional attachment to their original strategies and felt much more open to changing their minds. The control group felt wedded to their business plans and doggedly stayed their courses, no matter what evidence their efforts showed them to the contrary.
On the societal level, whether for localized or global groups, we are stronger when we aim for balance via flexible thinking about different perspectives and needs. More balanced, flexible thinking can lead to deeper cross-cultural understanding, which builds deeper connections—all of which can lead to stronger solutions to global problems.
Though examples on the societal count abound, consider one study that performed a meta-analysis of over five hundred other studies, comprising more than 250,000 participants. Across these varied studies with varied participants, the meta-analysis found that interacting with members of another group reduced prejudice in 94 percent of cases. And reducing prejudice across all lines and forms is the first major step toward a more nuanced understanding of other perspectives and ideas.
The connection between strength, flexibility, and balance applies to interpersonal relationships, too. The relationships that withstand intense trials flex with the changing situations and perspectives of the people involved—typically via leaning in and actively participating in the connection, rather than turning away. And these strong relationships can expand their flexibility as well: The stronger your relationship, the more flexible you can be with each other.
As supporting evidence, consider research that has shown that relationships in which two people turn toward each other in their responses to suggestions, comments, and requests survive longer than relationships in which two people either ignore or turn away from the other person. Turning toward the other person does not mean agreeing to the request, but positively responding to the request through active listening, engagement, and positivity. Relationships wherein one or both partners ignored or actively turned away from proposals rarely survived.
And trust: Actively participating in a dialogue with another person, especially when not in agreement or even when simply busy or distracted, takes strength training and dedication. And responding genuinely, openly, and honestly requires flexibility, in turn.
Therefore, I will try to remember this prompt, and I ask you to remember it as well:
When I find an area of my body and my mind that doesn’t flex as it should, I should wonder where I need to build more strength in myself. And when I find an area weaker than I’d like, I should wonder how to build more flexibility.
For us to have true balance, we need both.