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Stretching, Part 1: Why & When
Copyright 2005 Tanja Gardner
A martial artist friend came to me a few weeks ago, a little
confused about stretching. He’d heard a lot of conflicting
information about why, when and how to stretch for maximum
benefit, and he wanted to some clear guidance. I’ve
since had two other subscribers ask me exactly the same
question – which suggests that it’s an excellent
topic for a feature article.
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Why Strech
If you try to stretch a rubber band to its limits when
it’s cold, one of two things will happen. Either it
won’t stretch very far – or it will simply snap.
If, however, you roll it around in your hands and give it
a few less intense ‘practice stretches’, stretching
it to its full extent becomes easy, and the likelihood of
snapping it is minimal.
Your muscles work very similarly. Doing any kind of exercise
involving a range of movement your body isn’t used
to is just like stretching the rubber band. If you try to
do it ‘cold’, you’ll either get a very
small range of movement – or you move too far and
‘snap’ (or tear) the muscle tissue. Warm up
first however – do a few practice stretches –
and your full range of motion is easy to achieve safely.
It’s not only during your workout that this flexibility
is important. Your body works on a ‘use it or lose
it’ basis which means that, unless you stretch regularly,
your joints grow less flexible over time. Less flexibility
means less range of movement in your daily life –
so if you have to reach or twist to pick something up, you’re
more likely to injure yourself. And if you take part in
a sport or training programme that involves regularly contracting
your muscles (without including some kind of stretching),
you’ll find your general flexibility decreases even
faster.
There’s a third reason that many of us have been
taught to stretch – and that’s to avoid sore
muscles the next day. Unfortunately, there’s not a
lot of evidence that it will actually help. DOMS (Delayed
Onset Muscle Soreness) is the aching you feel when you’ve
pushed your muscles hard the day before. It happens because
the exercise has stressed your muscles to the point they’ve
developed microscopic tears in the fibres. And although
stretching may feel good after a long workout, there isn’t
a lot it can do to heal this ‘microtrauma’,
so it won’t have much effect on your level of soreness
the next day.
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When Should You Stretch?
Many of us were taught to stretch before we do any kind
of exercise. In fact, the best time to stretch depends on
the kind of exercise we’ll be doing. For simplicity’s
sake, we’re going to separate exercise into three
categories: strength training that involves slow, controlled
movements; training that involves quick, uncontrolled movements,
and anything else.
For strength training, there’s evidence that stretching
before a workout is counter-productive. Strength training
requires muscles to contract tightly against a heavy weight,
and loosening the muscle fibres by stretching them first
reduces their ability to do this. This doesn’t mean
you shouldn’t warm your muscles up before strength
training – just avoid stretching them first. If you
want to include stretching in the same workout as strength
training, it’s better to wait until after you’ve
finished your weights work.
For anything involving uncontrolled dynamic movements,
however (and this would include most sports, dance methods
and martial arts), stretching beforehand is important to
avoid injury. Just think back to the rubber band metaphor.
For anything that doesn’t fit into either of these
categories, you can probably include your stretching whenever
you want to. For example, if your exercise is walking (and
you do a lot of walking, so it’s within your usual
range of motion), you could stretch before, after, during
or any combination of the three.
The important thing about stretching is that it should
never be done on cold muscles. If you’re stretching
at the end of a workout, this isn’t usually a problem,
as your muscles will be well and truly warmed up. If you’re
stretching before your workout, however, experts recommend
warming up (doing some kind of light exercise that gets
your heart beating faster, and blood flowing to your muscles)
for at least 5-10 minutes before you begin to stretch.
In Part 2 of this article, we’ll look at different
types of stretching – and the right and wrong ways
to go about stretching safely and effectively. Until then,
if you have any specific questions about how the information
in this article applies to you, and would like to go through
it with a personal trainer, please contact me.
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