There are certainly more questions than conclusions about the benefits of stretching before and after exercising. My own experience says that you should first admit that flexibility is genetic the same way that being able to run a marathon in less than 2h and a half is so you should take it easy when striving for improvements.For years during my late twenties I was obsessed by the idea of having more flexibility, so I attended stretching classes at the gym, I knew by heart all about tons of different stretching exercises and I would spend at least 20 minutes stretching before doing any activity. I was also being told that by the rule of "no pain, no gain" that I should force my muscles up to the limit of pain in order to improve my flexibility. Kung Fu classes would later make this obsession stronger than ever.
Today I am able to clearly see the bullshit I've been through and how badly I was misled. I feel embarrassed when I remember some of my friends criticizing me while they didn't see why they should have so much flexibility as amateur runners; good ones, by the way. Truth be told, stretching is a powerful exercise, so it's nice that you stretch your muscles, but it should be seen as an activity by itself, that should be count on the amount of effort you put your body under.
I used to have a coach that would stretch you so strongly during running intervals saying that this was the best thing to do with your body to recover from the previous run and he was in fact hurting me. As a piece of advice, I recommend some reading before trusting what people say out there even though they are coaches and graduated on physical education.
What works best for my today is the warm-up rule: if I warm up for about 10 minutes, I don't need to stretch and I can run for hours without hurting my muscles.
I found a short and very educational video that summarizes the idea of stretching the best way possible, you may see it here:
1 comment:
Great article!
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