Assisted Stretching and Flexibility for the Athlete in You
Flexibility•Performance•Recovery
Manual Eccentric Resistance Stretching. Flexibility your body actually owns
Flexibility • Performance • Recovery
Assisted Stretching for Athletes and High Performers:
You demand a lot from your body. Resistance stretching gives you range you can actually use under load, not the passive kind that fades by the next practice.
We apply resistance by hand while the muscle lengthens, so your nervous system learns it can control the new range instead of guarding against it. That means faster recovery, better mechanics, and joints that hold up over a long career.
Twenty years of this work with players and coaches across MLB, NFL, WTA, NBA and NCAA Division 1.
For high school and collegiate athletes: the athletic window is long, and it closes early for the ones who get hurt. Specialization and year-round volume are asking more of young bodies than any generation before. We work on the other side of that equation, building the neuromuscular control and tissue resilience that keeps an athlete on the field. Parents are welcome to sit in on sessions.
Lehigh Valley office: 406 Delaware Avenue, Bethlehem, PA
What this work Actually Is
Most stretching asks a muscle to lengthen and hopes it holds. Your nervous system, sensing a position it can't control, quietly puts on the brakes. That's why passive flexibility fades, and why range without control so often turns into instability down the road.
Eccentric resistance stretching works with the nervous system instead of around it. As we lengthen a muscle, you contract against it. Real resistance, applied by hand, in real time, through the lengthening phase. Your body learns it can control the new range, so it stops guarding it. The flexibility becomes yours to keep.
Thirty to forty degrees of new range in a single session is common. But the range was never the point. Control is.
Resilience • Mobility • well being
Age Defiers
Aging isn't decline. It's what we do with the time.
Most of what we've been told about getting older isn't biology. It's a script and a lot of us are quietly done with it.
In twenty years of this work, we've helped people regain movements their surgeons said they wouldn't achieve. We've worked with athletes in their 50s, 60s and 70s rebuilding range and movement they'd written off years ago. We've sat with people who arrived believing their bodies had simply given up and watched them leave moving lighter, easier, more themselves.
Resistance stretching isn't a clever trick to roll back time. It's a way of returning the body to what it already knows how to do, by clearing the compensations and patterns that built up while no one was looking.
We speak both languages of the body
We speak two languages while we work: the anatomical one, for the part of you that wants to understand the mechanics, and the meridian and energetic one, for the part of you that's been quietly sensing there's more going on.
Plenty of people understand anatomy. Plenty understand energy. Very few do both, and the body asks for both.
Twenty years with professional athletes and high performers, and just as many with people carrying chronic injury, illness, and a lost sense of trust in their own body. Whichever end you're coming from, the approach doesn't change. Your body leads. We listen closely enough to follow it.
Susan Bianchi, MS
Pioneer and leading educator of resistance stretching for over twenty years, with a MS in exercise science and a lineage running back to the inaugural Meridian Stretching certification.
In 3 years she went from non-swimmer to attempting a crossing of the English Channel by relay. When the captain called the swim for dangerous weather, she was the last one in the water. "Keep me in as long as you can," she told him.
She named the business Intrinsic. It took her twenty more years to believe it.
OUR Intrinsic Athletes
Jordon O
22 yr old, collegiate D1 High Jumper, multiple year Patriot League Champion, addressed high school injury while optimizing and fine tuning the body for peak performance throughout the season.
"The knowledge is unparalleled! Susan is amazing! She mashed and stretched my body and gave me amazing add-ons to my strength training for my next marathon cycle!!! I’ve been an athlete my entire life and after today I feel I learned so much about the mind-body connection! Five stars all around!!!"
Lucia Patrone
David D
65yr old business owner, active adult, weekly sessions to keep his body flexible, moving well, thriving. A valued part of his personal wellness plan to keep feeling great, pro-active whole body care to prevent injury or limitations.
"Working with Susan added a whole other dynamic to my training regime that I had never even thought about before meeting her. It filled the void in my normal muscle training and really connected everything, giving me better strength and stability in everything I did. As well as taking away a lot of the aches that came with playing football in the NFL."
Alan Faneca -NFL Hall of Fame Inductee
Sue S
54 yr old lawyer, power lifting athlete rediscovering her own physical potential, address imbalances caused from work life, enabling her to be her best in her athlete life
"Resistance stretching with Susan is a life changing experience which can help with any isolated joint issue or injury but can also be a foundational health process as it has been for me for more than 10 years. She is a true partner in physical and spiritual health!"
Janet Jackson, Esq.
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