The Chris Abay Podcast S3:E1 — Why Yin Is Not Stretching

Season 3, Episode 1

Why Yin Is Not Stretching

Hello and welcome to Season 3 of the Chris Abay Podcast.

This is a mini-series of seven sessions where I’ll be sitting with you to chat specifically about the benefits of Yin Yoga and Myofascial Release.

I’m not inviting any guests onto this season because I want to dive deep and answer a lot of the questions that you’ve been asking me in classes.

Session one is: Why Yin Is Not Stretching.

I want to visit this first because I’ve had questions from students who have been with me for a while actually saying, “So what is Yin?”

Very quickly, people come to the assumption that it is stretching. And to be easy in conversation and non-argumentative, I’ll sometimes just say, “Yeah, sure, it’s stretching.”

But you see, that’s just not really the truth.

Let me unpack this for you a little bit.

Stretching is typically what we’ll do to a muscle. We’ll take a pose next to a wall, or you’ll see runners doing it: they’ll stop at the side of the road and sort of arch their leg backwards and try to get a stretch into the muscles of the hamstrings or perhaps their calf muscles.

In the gym, you’ll see people grabbing the wall with their hand and twisting to the side to open up through their pecs and shoulders.

This usually helps for one or two, maybe even five or six seconds, and it can feel really nice, right?

So you get into the belly of the muscle and you stretch the muscle itself, which can be quite stress-relieving, especially if that muscle has been under load.

Does this lead to more flexibility?

Usually not.

If you speak to runners, they’ll have a bunch of stretching exercises that they’re used to doing, but you can tell that they’re not necessarily getting any more flexible as they dive deeper into their sport.

The difference with Yin Yoga is that Yin doesn’t work necessarily on just the muscle.

In fact, the muscle is like a vehicle that takes you into the depth of the practice.

So in Yin Yoga, we start to focus beyond the muscle itself, although that can be the centre of the starting point. We go beyond the muscle and specifically get into the connective tissues that bind muscles, ligaments, bones and tendons together.

There is this stuff called fascia. I’ll come to this in greater detail later.

Fascia is what we target in Yin Yoga.

And the big difference between fascia and muscle is that muscle stretches, but fascia doesn’t. Fascia will not stretch. You can pull it taut and it will stress, but you can’t stretch it in the same way.

So to say that Yin Yoga is about stretching is a misnomer because the target tissue — the connective tissue, the fascia that we’re working on — does not stretch in the way muscle does.

If you imagine something a little bit like a plastic bag from a supermarket — the kind that have been banned now, which is a great move — if you get a plastic bag and try and pull it, it doesn’t really stretch like a rubber band.

But you can stress it, and very quickly it can stress beyond its natural range and it won’t return.

So you have to be careful with that.

It’s pliable, yes, especially when it’s warm.

The muscle is more like a rubber band. A rubber band you can stretch, right?

The fascia that we’re talking about in Yin — this connective network through the body — is what we’re targeting in Yin Yoga.

What does this mean?

Well, it means that we take a target posture where we will originate, yes, in one of the muscles — perhaps the quadriceps, for example.

We bring the skeleton into a position that loads the quadriceps so it goes towards its length. That might take a minute, perhaps 90 seconds, for that muscle to find its length.

After that, we start to spread the stress into the connective tissues beyond the muscle.

Muscle becomes tendon.

When we hold a pose for long enough — so well over a minute — the positive stress transfers through into the connective tissue.

Now we’re holding the connective tissue under stress, under load.

Where the muscle joins onto the bone, and where bone joins onto another bone through ligament, we hold these tissues under stress and maintain that stress in the non-stretchy connective chain — ligaments and tendons.

We maintain that stress for minutes.

Long enough to create an effect, but without overdoing it, because if you overstress that connective chain you can cause injury quite easily.

So without overdoing it, when we release the stress, that tissue is triggered to rehydrate.

What we’re really getting into is a change in the body by being careful with the amount of load that we put in.

A runner may stretch their muscle pretty much as hard as they can, expecting that by force they’ll get a longer stretch and more benefit.

The Yin practice is actually the opposite.

We’re using a lot less force and holding it for much longer.

Over time, we can trigger hydration and load tolerance in the connective tissues.

It can feel a little uncomfortable. It shouldn’t hurt.

It can feel a little boring because in Yin we must hold the pressure over a longer period of time.

If you just hold a stretch after a run for seven or eight seconds, there isn’t really time to get bored.

In the Yin practice, stillness — especially with A-type characters — can be challenging in and of itself.

It can feel boring. It can feel intense. It can feel emotionally charged.

But what happens on the other side of where we’d normally run away from that is a whole host of benefits.

Yin can also feel a little harder than a flow yoga practice because there’s nothing to distract you from the sensation.

In flow, you’re moving. You’re changing position. It can become more about performance and achievement.

Within Yin, that just isn’t the case.

We’re looking to play with the edge of sensation and hold that space long enough to make a difference.

It’s really about listening to the body rather than intensifying.

It’s about accepting that the space will arrive when it’s ready rather than forcing yourself to get to the next place.

What should you notice in your Yin class?

Well, you should notice sensation that changes without you doing anything.

And areas that soften when you stop trying.

I’ve seen it so often in classes: students who will grab hold of different body parts and try to pull themselves into a deeper stretch.

Yes, they’re forcing their muscles.

No, that’s not the Yin practice.

I like to come round and invite them to soften a little, stop grabbing their foot and pulling down, and stop engaging muscles in order to deepen the length.

I’ll say, “Look, leave your hands to one side and let the palms face up. Just relax.”

And they’ll whisper to me, “I’m not feeling anything, Chris. I need to feel something.”

And I’ll say, “It’s okay. Just let yourself soften into this and notice what softens when you stop trying.”

There is something beyond effort, and it’s only attainable in the Yin practice.

The moment when the effort drops, the awareness increases.

You may think at times that you’ve done stretching in the past and found that it hasn’t really worked for you.

“Well, I’ve tried that. I tried stretching. It doesn’t really work. I’ve been to stretching classes. I’ve done stretching with my personal trainer in the gym. It doesn’t really work for me.”

And that’s quite a normal story.

I would invite you especially to come to a Yin class and reframe your thinking.

Come out of the “I have to get something done, I have to feel a deep stretch” mindset, and allow yourself into the space where you can positively load the connective tissue.

So what is the difference between Yin Yoga and stretching? Why is Yin not stretching?

Because in the Yin practice, we’re not primarily targeting the stretchy material — the muscles.

We can work the muscles with dynamic practices, and I recommend it.

I recommend it highly.

Go to the gym. Load your muscles with weight. Load your muscles with resistance.

It’s very good for building lean muscle mass. It’s fantastic for increasing bone mineral density.

That becomes really important as we get older — like I am now — to build and maintain muscle strength and bone density.

Especially as we move beyond the age of 50 and into our 60s and 70s, falling over and losing balance can become a real health risk in life.

So muscle and bone are important.

I’m not saying don’t do that kind of training.

I’m saying do that training.

I highly recommend that you go to the gym, that you see your PT, that you go running, that you go swimming, that you go cycling.

Do all of those things as much as you want to — and more.

And then come and balance that Yang energy with the Yin practice.

You can start working on the connective tissues as well.

This will broaden the comparative load-bearing mechanism through your body, so you’ll be able to take more load, carry your weight, find balance and move with freedom.

It’s not necessarily just about increasing range, but increasing your usable range — how much you can extend and use your body under load.

I’m going to wrap this up now.

I think that’s pretty clear, but I would invite any questions.

You can always write to me.

As I develop YinWave, which is an evolution of AbaYoga, I’m moving into a different stage of my own teaching.

When I first built AbaYoga nearly a decade ago, it really represented the kind of power yoga that I’d spent much of my life doing when I lived in Australia and learned with some incredible teachers over there, many of whom you can visit through Season 1 of the Chris Abay Podcast.

However, now that I’ve got older, I’m focusing more on the softer arts — the therapeutic arts.

And this is the evolution of AbaYoga into what I’m calling YinWave.

It is a Yin-led energy that also creates this resonance through the presence of the gong practice.

So I’m also expanding the gong and sound offerings as well.

Now, this won’t appeal to everybody.

And if it doesn’t appeal to you, I’m only grateful that you’ve listened long enough to find out, and I wish you well.

If it does appeal to you, then please come back and listen to more.

There are six more episodes in this mini-series, and I’ll be addressing as many issues as I can to help you feel safe in the container that is YinWave.

Thanks for listening.