Should you stretch before exercise?
The buzz with most trainers and gym bros these days is that static stretching is dead, and doing so before exercise will destroy gains and turn you into a weak girly man.
This is an about face from the days that many of us donned out short shorts for school PE, while the teacher told us we have to stretch before we do anything.
So has science discovered that the trusty PE teacher was wrong?
This is an area of massive confusion.
The "don’t stretch" message comes out of studies that showed us that static stretching prior to exercise, reduces strength. But Jeebus forbid that anyone would actually read the research that made this claim. But if you did, you would discover that the research uncovered that stretches that were held in excess of 60 seconds, resulted in a reduction in power and explosiveness when the exercise was performed immediately after the bout of stretching.
Hardly a real world application.
So if you are someone who intends to perform a max vertical jump after holding a stretch for over 1 minute, then expect some loss in height. Even if we went along with the unfounded claims that stretching reduced strength (which it doesn’t), would there still be reason to stretch prior to exercise?
Like anything that we deliberately do to our bodies, such as exercise, there should be a reason for our choices.
Many people choose to stretch to reduce injuries, but this is a complex area of debate. To date, no conclusive data has confirmed this, but I feel that it is an area that hasn’t been studied well. You may have well experienced the same pre-exercise stretching that I did in school; touch the toes, bring the arm across the body and a couple of other low level limbering up activities.
Hardly a targeted strategy.
Unfortunately the research has been much the same.
Stretching should be something that is targeted, and applied when needed. Touching your toes isn’t going to help reduce your risk of a shoulder injury, and stretching a muscle that doesn’t doesn’t need stretching has no rhyme or reason.
If one side of my body is laterally flexed due to tightness on that side, and stretching can help to straighten up my torso, even for the 30 minutes it is said to effect, would this not be beneficial? Allowing joints to move freely as a result of evening up tension on both sides, is surely a way to improve both my injury risk and performance.
The key is to know what to stretch. And that is an individual thing.
Your body tells the story of what it has been through, and reactive tightness and shortening of muscles, and altered joint positions are the tune that your body moves to. Finding more harmony in these positions can allow you to move more freely, which could play a part in reducing injury and improving muscle activation patterns and joint loading sequences.
So the question of should you stretch before a workout, should really be answered with logic. Does stuff not move good? Then find a way to make it move good prior to activity, and targeted stretching, along with other methods to make it stick, can certainly be a part of that.