Lifestyle
What is a 'flexologist' — and do you need to see one?
The signs seemed to be proliferating around Los Angeles — along Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, in mini-malls on Pacific Coast Highway, on side streets in Glendale and Venice: StretchLab, Stretch Zone, StretchSPOT, StretchMed.
Deborah Vankin’s 50-minute stretch session included 13 stretches on either side of her body.
(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)
I’d been curious about assisted stretching for a while. But I never thought to visit a studio. Sure, “recovery” is a growing trend in fitness — meaning rejuvenating muscles, tendons and the central nervous system between exercise sessions by focusing on hydration, proper nutrition, sleep and, yes, active stretching so as to maximize athletic performance. But I own three foam rollers — one smooth, one spiky, one padded — and even use them at home. I’m also far from an extreme athlete, preferring instead brisk hikes for cardio and basic strength training.
Why would I drive to a mini-mall and pay someone to stretch me? What would that even look like — and was it worth it?
The questions rumbled in my head as I drove past yet another StretchLab recently — this one on Beverly Boulevard near Hollywood. So I called them up.
StretchLab has 15 locations in the L.A. area, including in Echo Park.
(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)
Turns out StretchLab, which opened its first studio in Venice in 2015, now has more than 500 studios nationwide, 15 of them in the L.A. area. Its clientele are generally either serious athletes, older adults and desk workers who struggle with stiffness and want to work on their mobility, or those healing injuries and other conditions. They come to be stretched out more deeply, in positions they couldn’t possibly get into, physically, on their own. Many of them appreciate the intimacy and accountability of working with a practitioner, one-on-one. And it can be helpful to have a professional, with a trained eye, isolate asymmetries in their bodies and guide their stretching, especially for those who suffer from chronic pain or are healing an injury, says StretchLab‘s director of marketing, Gabi Khowploum.
“We see a lot of people who say, ‘Hey, I’m having back pain,’” Khowploum says. “And they come to stretch it, but it might be they’re having issues with hip mobility — they just don’t realize it.”
Stretch therapists — or “flexologists,” as they’re sometimes called — are not doctors. Chiropractors, physical therapists and some massage therapists are trained in assisted stretching — but stretch therapists can’t do what they do. Stretch therapists don’t diagnose and treat injuries; they don’t provide spinal or joint manipulation, imaging such as X-rays or CT scans or massage. They focus, instead, on stretching muscles and fascia to increase flexibility and mobility. There also isn’t a national certification for stretch therapists, as there is for physical therapists and chiropractors, though most stretch therapists are certified in-house by their respective employers.
Dr. Jeremy Swisher, a sports medicine physician at UCLA Health, says assisted stretching can help increase range of motion and flexibility, stimulate blood flow, which aids healing, and help with posture, particularly for sedentary populations, as well as alleviate stress. Done consistently, long term, it can help with pain relief and stiffness and — possibly — prevent injuries. But it’s “not a cure-all,” he warns.
“It’s just a piece of the puzzle,” he says. “Strength training and other forms of exercise are equally as important, long term.” Swisher also warns that assisted stretching could exacerbate existing injuries “like an acute sprain or tear without being cleared by a doctor first.” And for those with hypermobility syndromes, meaning overly flexible joints, “it’s important to be mindful that increased stretching could lead to dislocations of the joints.”
On a recent Friday afternoon, StretchLab in Echo Park was busier than I would have expected. Several clients laid on their backs on what looked like massage tables as their flexologists rolled or twisted or pressed on their body parts — a limb over the shoulder here, a spinal twist there.
Flexologist Joel Badilla walks Deborah Vankin through the MAPS assessment process.
(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)
My practitioner, Joel Badilla, walked me through the assessment before my 50-minute session (as a “drop in,” it cost me $125, but prices differ depending on the package and location). StretchLab uses a 3-D body scanning tool called MAPS, which TRX Training developed for them. It assesses mobility (range of motion), activation (quality of movement), posture and symmetry so as to isolate areas that are tight or imbalanced and customize a stretch program for the client. I did three overhead squats in front of an iPad before MAPS gave me a score in each area. (Scores far lower than I would have liked, the culprits being tight hips and “tech neck,” but such is the case with desk workers, I was told.)
Then I laid down on the table and Badilla lifted my legs and gently pulled them forward, toward him. It felt wonderful, as if my spine were elongating, all the stress draining from my back. He then put me through 26 stretches, 13 on each side of my body.
Joel Badilla tugs gently on Deborah Vankin’s legs at the start of her stretch session.
(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)
StretchLab uses PNF stretching (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation), Badilla explained, which is a “push and release” technique. The recipient holds the stretch for a set period of time, then pushes into resistance provided by the practitioner for a shorter period of time, then goes back into a deeper version of the stretch. We did this repeatedly for different body parts.
Afterward, I felt loose and limber heading back to my car — though the sensation didn’t last for very long after my car ride home. That’s because the benefits of stretching come from consistency, says Amber Donaldson, vice president of Sports Medicine Clinics for the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
“Just stretching once isn’t beneficial,” she says. “You need two weeks, minimum, of consistency to see a benefit. These [assisted stretching] places — paying for a series of treatments may keep you consistent with going.”
That said, there are questions around the benefits of stretching, overall, in the sports medicine community, Donaldson adds. “It’s controversial. When should you do it — before or after a workout — and to what extent is it beneficial at all? The jury is still out.”
Assisted stretching, if done consistently over many weeks, may help with stiffness, pain relief and even injury prevention.
(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)
StretchLab is far from an anomaly in L.A. There are more than half a dozen dedicated assisted stretching businesses in the area — and the trend, which began to swell nationwide in 2017-18, only seems to be growing. In addition to franchises like StretchLab and Stretch Zone, many personal trainers offer assisted stretching, as do most physical therapists. Gyms such as Life Time in Orange County and the Los Angeles Athletic Club offer one-on-one assisted stretching now. Even certain massage outlets, such as Massage Envy, offer 30 and 60-minute assisted stretching sessions.
The basic concept of assisted stretching is the same, no matter where you go, but different studios take slightly different approaches.
Stretch Zone in Redondo Beach and Rancho Palos Verdes doesn’t use the PNF technique. Instead, the studio (which has almost 400 outlets nationwide) uses a graduated stretch modality that moves the client along an intensity scale of one-10. It starts at a three “right when you first start to feel the stretch,” owner Deborah Ashley says, “and seven is where you want us to stop.” They also use a patented system of belts and straps on a stretch table “to secure and mobilize one side of your body while we stretch the other,” Ashley says. “It acts like a second set of hands for our practitioners.”
StretchMed in Glendale has only one location in the L.A. area (there are about 30 in the U.S.). It prides itself on not being part of an especially big franchise, says owner Carlos Rivera, adding that the studio takes a personal and data-driven approach to stretch therapy. It does use the PNF stretching technique but puts a good deal of emphasis on warming up before one-on-one stretch sessions. Toward that end, clients do 15-minute warm-up routines on so-called “stretch trainers,” which have tilted seats, leg pads and safety straps for stability. A video walks them through the routine, which includes gentle movement and is meant to stimulate circulation. “You want to warm up before you stretch,” Rivera says, “to get a much better benefit.”
Would I do assisted stretching again?
Absolutely — it was gentler than I imagined and I felt immediate relief afterward, particularly in my lower back.
Would I do it regularly?
Not for StretchLab’s membership rate of $320 a month, their cheapest monthly package of four 50-minute sessions (prices vary slightly by location). At Stretch Zone, the roughly comparable package of four 60-minute sessions is $400. At StretchMed, four 55-minute sessions is $216.
But on this particular Friday, at least, I headed into the weekend feeling looser and, if nothing else, an inch or so taller. I’ll take it.
A firefighter works as homes burn during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, Calif., on Jan. 7, 2025.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
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Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
On New Year’s Eve 2024, journalist Jacob Soboroff was sitting around a campfire with a friend when he made an offhand comment that would come back to haunt him: The last thing he wanted to do in the new year, Soboroff said, was cover a story that would require donning a fire-safe yellow suit.
Just one week later, Soboroff was dressed in the yellow suit, reporting live from a street corner in Los Angeles as fire tore through the Pacific Palisades, the community where he was raised.
“This was a place that I could navigate with my eyes closed,” Soboroff says of the neighborhood. “Every hallmark of my childhood I was watching carbonize in front of me. … There were firefighters there and first responders and other journalists there, but it was an extremely lonely, isolating experience to be standing there as everything I knew burned down around me in real time.”
In his new book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster, Soboroff offers a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe, told through the voices of firefighters, evacuees, scientists and political leaders. He says covering the wildfires was the most important assignment he’s ever undertaken.
“The experience of doing this is something that I don’t wish on anybody, but in a way I wish everybody could experience,” he says. “It’s given me insane reverence for our colleagues in the local news community here, who, I think, definitionally were exercising a public service in the street-level journalism that they were doing and are still doing. … It was actually beautiful to watch because they are as much a first responder on a frontline as anybody else.”
Interview highlights
On the experience of reporting from the fires
You’re choking with the smoke. And I almost feel guilty describing it from my vantage point because the firefighters would say things to me like: “My eyeballs were burning. We were laying flat on our stomach in the middle of the concrete street because it was so hot, it was the only way that we could open the hoses full bore and try to save anything that we could.” …
I could feel the heat on the back of my neck as we stood in front of these houses that I remember as the houses that cars and people would line up in front of for the annual Fourth of July parade or the road race that we would run through town. Trees were on fire behind us — we were at risk of structures falling at any given minute. It was pretty surreal because this is a place I had spent so much time as a child and going back to as an adult. … I had no choice but to just open my mouth and say what I saw to the millions of people that were watching us around the country.
On undocumented immigrants being central to rebuilding the city
These types of massive both humanitarian and natural disasters give us X-ray vision for a time into sort of the fissures that are underneath the surface in our society. And Los Angeles, in addition to being one of the most unequal cities between the rich and the poor, has more undocumented people than virtually any other city in the United States of America. Governor Newsom knew that with the policies of the incoming administration, some of the very people that would be responsible for the cleanup and the rebuilding of Los Angeles may end up in the crosshairs of national immigration policy. And I think that that was an understatement. …
Pablo Alvarado in the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said to me that often the first people into a disaster — the second responders after the first — are the day laborers. They went to Florida after Hurricane Andrew, to New Orleans after Katrina, and they’d be ready to go in Los Angeles. And I went out and I cleaned up Altadena and Pasadena with some of them in real time.
And only months later did this wide-scale immigration enforcement campaign begin … on the streets of LA as sort of the Petri dish, the guinea pig for expanding this across the country. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that the parking lots of Home Depots, where workers [were] looking to get involved in the rebuilding of Los Angeles, has been ground zero for that enforcement campaign.
On efforts to rebuild
The pace is slow and it’s sort of a hopscotch of development. And I think for people who do come back, for people who can afford to come back, it’s going to be a long road ahead. You’re going to have half the houses on your street under construction for years to come. And for people that do inhabit those homes, it’s going to an isolating experience. But there’s an effort underway to rebuild. …
There’s also a lot of for-sale signs. And that’s the sad reality of this, is that there are people who, whether it’s that they can’t afford to come back … or that they just can’t stomach it, I think, sadly, a lot people are not going to be returning to their homes.
On what the Palisades and Altadena look like today
They both look like very big construction sites in a way. There are still some facades, some ruins of the more historic buildings in the Palisades. … But mostly it’s just empty lots. And in Altadena, the same thing. If you drive by the hardware store, the outside is still there. But it’s a patchwork of empty lots. Homes now under construction. And lots and lots of workers. … There are still a handful of people who are living in both the Palisades and in Altadena, but for the most part, these are communities where you’ve got workers going in during the day and coming out at night. …
We have designed this community to be one that’s in the crosshairs of a fire just like the one we experienced and that we will certainly, certainly experience again, because nobody’s packing it up and leaving Los Angeles. People may not return to their communities after they’ve lost their homes, but the ship has sailed on living in the wildland urban interface in the second largest city in the country.
On seeing this story, personally, as his “most important assignment”
Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
Jason Frank Rothenberg/HarperCollins
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Jason Frank Rothenberg/HarperCollins
I don’t think I realized at the time how badly I needed the connections that I made in the wake of the fire, both with the people who have lost homes and the firefighters, first responders who were out there, but also honestly with my own family, my immediate family, my wife and my kids, my mom and my dad and my siblings and myself. I think that this was a really hard year in LA, and I think in the wake of the fire, I was experiencing some level of despair as well. Then the ICE raids happened here and sort of turned our city upside down. And this book for me was just this amazing cathartic blessing of an opportunity to find community with people I don’t think I ever would have otherwise spent time with, and to reconnect with people who I hadn’t seen or heard from in forever.
Anna Bauman and Nico Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Tom Layward, the narrator and main character of Ben Markovits’ new novel, The Rest of Our Lives, introduces himself in a curious way: On the very first page of the book, he talks, matter-of-factly, about the affair his wife, Amy, had 12 years ago, when their two kids were young.
Amy, who’s Jewish, got involved at a local synagogue in Westchester; Tom, who was raised Catholic and is clearly not a joiner, remained on the sidelines. At the synagogue, Amy met Zach Zirsky, who Tom describes as “the kind of guy who danced with all the old ladies and little pigtailed girls at a bar mitzvah, so he could also put his arm around the pretty mothers and nobody would complain.”
After the affair came out, Tom and Amy decided to stay together for the kids: a boy named Michael and his younger sister, Miriam. But, Tom tells us “I also made a deal with myself. When Miriam goes to college you can leave, too.” The deal, Tom says, “helped me get through the first few months … [when] we had to pretend that everything was fine.”
Twelve years have since passed and the marriage has settled back into a state of OK-ness. Miriam, now 18, is starting college in Pittsburgh and because Amy is having a tough time with Miriam’s departure, Tom alone drives her to campus.
And, once Tom drops Miriam off, he just keeps driving, westward; without explanation to us or to himself; as though he’s a passenger in a driverless car that has decided to carry him across “the mighty Allegheny” and keep on going.
The three-page scene where Tom passively melds into the trans-continental traffic flow constitutes a master class on how to write about a character who is opaque to himself. “[Y]ou don’t feel anything about anything,” Amy says early on to Tom — an accusation that’s pretty much echoed by Tom’s old college girlfriend, Jill, whom he spontaneously drops in on at her home in Las Vegas, after being out of touch for roughly 30 years.
But, if Tom is distanced from his own feelings (and vague about the “issue” he had “with a couple of students” that forced him to take a leave from teaching in law school), he’s a sharp diagnostician of other people’s behavior. What fuels this road trip is Tom’s voice — by turns, wry, mournful and, oh-so-casually, astute.
There’s a strain of Richard Ford and John Updike in Tom’s tone, which I mean as a high compliment. Take, for instance, how Tom chats to us readers about a married couple who are old friends of his and Amy’s:
[Chrissie] was maybe one of those women who derives secret energy from the troubles of her friends. Her husband, Dick, was a perfectly good guy, about six-two, fat and healthy. He worked for an online tech platform. I really don’t know what he did.
So might most of us be summed up for posterity.
As Tom racks up miles, taking detours to visit other folks out of his past, like his semi-estranged brother, his meandering road trip accrues in suspense. There’s something else he’s subconsciously speeding away from here besides his marriage. Tom tells us at the outset that he’s suffering from symptoms his doctors ascribe to long COVID: dizziness and morning face swelling so severe that daughter Miriam jokingly calls him “Puff Daddy.” Shortly after he reaches the Pacific, Tom also lands in the hospital. “Getting out of the hospital,” Tom dryly comments, “is like escaping a casino, they don’t make it easy for you.”
The canon of road trip stories in American literature is vast, even more so if you count other modes of transportation besides cars — like, say, rafts. But, the most memorable road trips, like The Rest of Our Lives, notice the easy-to-miss signposts — marking life forks in the road and looming mortality — that make the journey itself everything.
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