In simple terms, fascia is a thin sheath that wraps around our muscles and organs, offering support and reducing friction during movement. Fascia wraps around the muscle, and is weaved within to provide smooth movement between fibres. Injury, poor postural habits, stress induced muscle tension, physical inactivity and dehydration can cause the fascia to become unhealthy. Over time, adhesions and scar tissue build up to restrict the movement of muscles and fascia, resetting your neurological pathways to become less responsive.

Active muscles are learning and sending signals to the brain, ultimately leading to constant adaptation. Static muscles, either in a stretch or in a massage, are NOT active at all, and thus, take substantially longer to adapt, IF they adapt at all. Using a high-velocity percussive device, we unlock your body’s fascial neuromuscular pathways with a mild pulsing pressure that acts very similar to a massage, only so much more effective. During the pulse, we actively engage the muscle and move it through the entire range of motion while stimulating the nervous system. This combination produces immediate results, as well as long-term retraining of the neural programming of your myofascial connections. Now you know the secret! Massage alone is passive, and so is static stretching. Once you make it active you unlock the muscle and the magic of what your body is capable of. Our FNS technique also helps relax sore, stiff muscles, improves mobility and range of motion, and accelerates warmup and recovery time for many clients. And it feels AMAZING!!!

To fully understand why SCS is the best stretching technique in the world, you must first have a basic understanding of what ACTUALLY happens when you stretch a muscle. Although it’s a common assumption, muscles don’t exactly work like elastic bands. While there is an elastic property to muscle and tendons, when you stretch you don’t actually make the muscle longer. The muscle is fixed to tendons and those tendons are anchored to your skeletal system. There is no changing the shape of that. The muscles ability to “stretch” is a direct result of your nervous system’s ability to handle the pressure in any given range of motion. Your body is constantly sending signals back and forth between your nervous system and your muscles. It’s literally how we move. With SCS stretching we begin with finding a comfortable stretch near your end range. From there, we have you actively engage the muscle and contract while we stretch you. This (in basic terms) sends a signal to your nervous system and tells it “we are safe here, we are strong and we can push further”. After the contraction, you then relax the muscle again, and because the nervous system has been communicated with and has learned, the range of motion immediately increases. This does NOT happen with ANY other form of stretching! We then repeat that cycle several times. This is completely different from any other form of stretching because we are actively reprogramming the communication channels between the body and the brain, telling the body over and over again that it is safe to allow for an increased range of motion. That is why there are immediate and longer lasting results (and relief) with SCS.

House of Stretch Vancouver is more than just a 1-on-1 assisted stretch treatment. Throughout a session, we use a variety of different modalities in order to help reset the postural stress placed on the body, giving you an opportunity to reboot and balance out stressed and tight muscles. This includes manual therapy, percussion therapy (using a high frequency massage tool), and of course deep assisted stretch therapy. Each session begins with a combination of manual therapy and percussion therapy, while we passively move your muscle through the full range of motion. We then combine this with SCS stretching to allow for full body relaxation and recovery.

There is a common misconception that stretching only applies to athletes or those who are highly active. This is simply untrue as daily stressors placed on our body can cause pain, discomfort, and lead to sub-optimal functioning. Stress-induced muscle tension, poor postural habits, dehydration, and physical inactivity are just a few daily stressors that can ultimately lead to poor mobility and flexibility, which in turn leads to difficulty performing daily tasks. New evidence in the British Journal of Medicine states that, “sitting is the new smoking”, which can ultimately "take a decade of your life”. The benefits from House of Stretch Vancouver protocols will not only include increased physical well-being and energy, but also improved mental health. Our methods have been proven to increase blood flow to the brain, improve posture, relieve stress, activate neurological pathways for optimal muscle functioning, and help with cognitive focus.