What is Being Changed?
ReTensioning is primarily a neurological technique in that it elicits a change in a client by getting them to change their tensional coordination and muscle use at rest without the practitioner directly changing the structural characteristics of any tissue. No stretching or breaking up scars or fascia, no increasing muscle mass or blood flow in an area, and no prolonged positioning. So then the question is what is being changed with ReTensioning?
I have watched this a lot over the past few years and I think what is really being changed is space, not things. No, it’s not some relativistic, sci-fi magic (that would be pretty cool, though) but the way in which a client fills their internal space is changed. They check in with their body at rest, have a template of how it should feel in the joints and if the feeling and template match they can assume they are at rest. However, that template often does not allow for the joint to be at neutral, truly minimal activity, when the joint is resting. Why not? Or more to the point what is missed?
I think what is happening is that most of us are a little inaccurate about the shape of the space we occupy both internally and externally. We don’t really fill up all the space we command inside our skin and often have a poor sense of the shape of the space we fill up outside our skin. At the joints we don’t let them rest at neutral because our concept of what rest is does not include the room to have the joint surfaces mate in a relationship that allows minimal activity, we have an imperfect idea of the spacial relationships of the bones to each other inside the joint capsule.
It sounds pretty far down the rabbit hole but it is really pretty simple. Think about how you learn an activity, say swinging a racquet at a ball. At first you have to think a lot about each strike just to get the racquet to hit the ball, how to get your joints in the correct relationship to swing. Once you get the hang of that then you begin to figure out how to put spin on the ball, that is, to shift your joint relationships at impact just a little. As you progress you get finer and finer adjustments letting you control the balls flight after you hit it better and better. Why didn’t you just hit that way from the start? Because you never spent that kind of time consciously refining the joint control for that activity.
Now we all know people who seem to pick up new movements very easily and quickly. What about them? I think those people throughout their life have been more conscious of how they move and use their joints. Is it innate talent, a gift of DNA? It may well be to a degree but in my experience of working with good athletes they just enjoy observing how they move and how to refine it and always have. So they have spent time watching and learning from related movements and so the change to a new one is not as great as someone who has not been as interested in this.
The point is it seems many of us don’t seem to realize how we stress our joints, ever so slightly, when we think we are resting and ReTensioning® appears to give the little extra input to the spatial relationships inside our joints so we can make our lives easier.