Posture (Stretching) and Flexibility
I practice P&F with Katy Beattie (“Bliss Massage” / Stable Health Clinic) once a week, and I have really improved in just one year! It gets easier with time and it does help release a lot of muscular tension. Plus, you get to learn proper stretches and take them home with you 
Here is a reproduction of Kit Laughlin’s interesting insight on stretching.
About Posture & Flexibility
“The goal of what we call simply ‘P&F’ is the efficient acquisition of flexibility, using safe techniques. Additional benefits are (in the more advanced classes) enhanced proprioceptive senses, increased strength (especially at the extremes of the normal range of movement) and improved balance.
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The body needs time to recover from any activity sufficiently stressful to provoke the adaptation reaction. It is a point that escapes most people who train in gyms: that adaptation (and hence growth or increase in strength or endurance) does not happen while you train, but after, while you are resting (and where there is adequate nutrition). And the same is true for stretching: there is no advantage to be gained by trying to stretch a sore or tight muscle. Try again in a day or two, however, and the sensation is entirely different.
Most of you will have heard of ‘PNF’ stretching, but few will know that the term as it is generally used around gyms everywhere is a misnomer. In the original textbook Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation there was a brief, one paragraph, mention of the ‘Contract-Relax’ (what we now call the C-R approach, and what most people mean by ‘PNF’) method of increasing range of movement in the joints and muscles of the cerebrally-or spinally-injured, along with agonist-antagonist approaches, and a number of others.
We have tested all approaches on average healthy people (and perhaps surprisingly, those with neck and back pain, too) and have found it simply the most effective-and safe—method for increasing flexibility.� Briefly, it involves taking a limb into a stretch position and holding it there for 20″ or so, gently pushing or pulling back against a suitable resistance using the muscle in which the stretch was felt, and (on a deliberate breath out) re-stretching and holding that final position for 30″ or so (or more for larger muscle groups).
There is more to the P&F approach than simply using the C-R approach to stretching, though. We have devised a huge range of stretches for the body—in fact we claim that we have a stretch for every muscle in the body—based on the major Yoga poses, the effective techniques from dance and gymnastics, and from two traditional Japanese exercise forms (Jikyo Jutsu and Makko Hoo). In addition, we have designed around thirty new stretches, based on my work with athletes, or simply by using my anatomical knowledge to create a stretch where none existed.”
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