8 New Year, New You Fitness & beauty Get stretched
With a slew of stretching studios popping up around London and the UK, we explore the myriad health benefits of getting stretched by a professional. Words: Jennifer Barton
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Promotional Content • Saturday 8th January 2022
an’t touch your toes? Tere’s professional help for that. Assisted stretching studios, which offer one-on-one
sessions with trained ‘stretchologists’, are on the rise. Assisted stretching involves another person doing the work for you. You simply relax your body and they’ll pull you this way and that, allowing for a deeper stretch than most of us can achieve on our own. “With assisted stretching, you’re
going to get benefits faster, and they’re going to last longer. Someone is helping you to take your body a little bit further than you can,” says stretch inc founder Rachele Gilman. Pandemic living has led to stiffness:
the result of sitting on bad furniture, physical and mental exhaustion and home workouts without correction. “It’s one of the first things on
people’s to-do lists. Most want to get more flexible, but their reasons vary wildly,” says Suzanne Wylde, founder of Moving Stretch, which offers a type of resistance stretching and has a range of self-stretching videos online. “A lot of people think of stretching as getting longer muscles, tendons and ligaments, but when you resist and you move, you improve the quality of the tissue in the body. Tat’s a more important improvement than flexibility,” she explains. Stretching is something we should
all be doing; science backs up the benefits assisted stretching can
After a year of being starved of socialisation,
assisted stretching offers human contact
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY
offer, including ones we can’t see, like better cardiovascular health. However, as StretchLAB co-founder Kunal Kapoor says: “It’s one of those things everyone knows they should be doing, but they don’t, because to do it by yourself isn’t that easy. However, that changes once you’re in the hands of a professional.” Stretchologists are a varied bunch:
dancers, physios, yoga teachers, massage and sports therapists are all drawn to the field. While assisted stretching may once have catered mostly to high-intensity athlete types, studios like StretchLAB and stretch inc are all about accessibility and inclusivity. Tey both use percussive therapy (massage guns) to activate muscles and get blood flowing at the start of each session. Tese stretching studios offer more
than just benefits for the body: they soothe the mind, too. Kunal explains he had a client who was coming to StretchLAB daily not because of mobility issues, but to ease anxiety. After a periods where we’ve been
so starved of socialisation, assisted stretching offers something else: human contact. “I think a lot of people just miss being touched. It’s a connection, but it’s not passive like a massage is,” says Suzanne. But she warns that clients should be aware of getting overstretched and says it isn’t a replacement for seeing a doctor. But with improved mood, posture and performance — plus sessions from just 15 minutes — assisted stretching has an undeniable appeal in our always-on lifestyles. “I think there will be an assisted stretching studio in every neighbourhood soon,” says Rachele.
stretchinc.uk movingstretch.com
stretch-lab.co.uk
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