The Physiology of Yoga

tendons connect muscle to bone, transmitting the force generated by the muscle to move the skeleton at a joint. Ligaments connect bone to bone, providing stability and limiting movement at a joint. Both are composed of collagen-rich, dense fibrous connective tissue.

Bones also store 98 percent of the body’s calcium

One way that our body adapts to exercise is by increasing tendon stiffness (Reeves 2006).

By becoming stiffer through adaptation, tendons become more efficient at

flexibility as joint ROM and break it down between active and passive ROM.

A study by Krabak and colleagues (2001) examined the passive ROM in patients before, during, and after anesthesia, finding a significant increase during anesthesia. Knowing that anesthesia puts the nervous system in a suspended state, this suggests the CNS, not muscle length, is an important contributor to flexibility.

the fascia lata (a sheath of fascia covering all the muscles of the thigh like a stocking) as distinct from the iliotibial tract (the band of fascia that spans the length of the outer thigh from the pelvis to the top of the outer shin, the tibia).

A standing forward fold, by any name, is a static stretch, and all stretching is a tensile force applied to a myofascial unit. It should be noted that as tensile force is applied to tissues, they creep. Creep is the biomechanical term for the deformation of viscoelastic tissues. Once the tensile force is removed, tissues then recover and return to

bone adapts its architecture to the stresses put on it, a concept that came to be known as Wolff’s law