Quick Health Tip - Neural System Affecting Flexibility

The Neural System does affect our flexibility or range of motion. The Golgi Tendon Organs (GTO), muscle spindles, mechanoreceptors, and reciprocal innervation influences neural management of ROM. The GTO help facilitate autogenic inhibition, which is the prevention of muscle contraction by promoting muscle relaxation and preventing excess force that can cause damage.

Muscle spindles are parallel to the muscle fibers that helps identify the length and velocity of a stretch. They tend to stay dormant during slow stretches, but they do tense during high-speed stretching to help prevent overstretching.

​Mechanoreceptors are specialized sensory organs that response to different mechanical stimuli, are found around the synovial joints and have the following functions: signals direction and velocity, regulates joint pressure, facilitate muscle tone, produce inhibitory pain effects, and a joint receiver of pain signals. Reciprocal innervation is known to influence tissue elongation by relaxing antagonist muscle groups when the counterpart tenses up.