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...............if performed BEFORE warmup exercises instead of after.
I originally posted this in the Andre Johnson hammy injury: Early reports say "not serious" thread.
After speaking to Infrantrycak, I thought I needed to post this to clarify my concerns on the injury front.
Stretching before exercise can lead to less flexibility, tighter muscles, and injury. Yes, stretching is important. However, it is only useful and necessary when performed after a work out or activity. Ask yourself, what is the purpose of a warm up? Simple right, to warm up our body and prepare our muscles for the action to come. Well, stretching does not warm up our muscles! And ironically, stretching cold muscles can cause rather than prevent an injury. When our muscles are cold, or in their natural state, they are rigid. This inflexibility makes them sensitive to any strains or changes in length, and therefore susceptible to over-extension. However, once our body temperature is up and blood flows to our muscles, they are ready to take advantage of the benefits of a relaxing, cool down stretch. Think of a raw piece of spaghetti; if you were to bend it, it would snap in half. But, once you “warm it up,” it will bend any way desired.
I originally posted this in the Andre Johnson hammy injury: Early reports say "not serious" thread.
The thing that I've noticed and has been bothering me is that right when the players hit the field for pregame "warmups," they begin their stretching exercises.
After speaking to Infrantrycak, I thought I needed to post this to clarify my concerns on the injury front.
Want a better workout? Don't stretch before
Do a light jog or sport-specific warm-up, experts say
By Maria Cheng AP Medical Writer
LONDON - Want a better workout? Then don't stretch beforehand, some experts say.
Many people take it for granted that they should start their exercise routines with some stretching on the spot, perhaps hoping it will loosen them up for their workout. Most fitness experts now agree this kind of static stretching before exercise is not just counter-productive, but potentially harmful.
Traditional stretches, like when people bend over to touch their toes or stretch their legs on a fence, often cause the muscles to tighten rather than relax - exactly the opposite of what is needed for physical activity.
Experts say it is like extending a rubber band to its limit. When people stretch to the maximum, they are more likely to pull a muscle.
"We have developed this idea of static stretching at exactly the wrong time," said Kieran O'Sullivan, an exercise expert at the University of Limerick in Ireland, who has studied various types of stretching and their impact on athletes.
When you stretch before exercising, your body may think it's at risk of being overstretched. It compensates by contracting and becoming more tense. That means you aren't able to move as fast or as freely, making you more likely to get hurt.
O'Sullivan said stretching helps with flexibility, but people should only do it when they aren't about to exercise, like after a workout, or at the end of the day.
"It's like weight training to become stronger," he said. "You wouldn't do a weight session right before you exercise, and you shouldn't stretch right before either."
In the last few years, several studies have found static stretching before playing a sport makes you slower and weaker.
And when experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention combed through more than 100 papers looking at stretching studies, they found people who stretched before exercise were no less likely to suffer injuries such as a pulled muscle, which the increased flexibility from stretching is supposed to prevent.
Warm up with a light jog
Instead of stretching, many experts recommend warming up with a light jog or sport-specific exercise, like kicking for football or a few serves for tennis. That type of light movement increases the heart rate and blood flow to the muscles, warming up the body temperature.
"This allows you to approach your full range of motion, but in a very controlled way," said Dr. Anders Cohen, chief of neurosurgery and spine surgery at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and former physician for the U.S. Tennis Open. Cohen said elite athletes in all sports are increasingly ditching static stretching and using other warm-up techniques instead.
But the message has yet to trickle down to legions of joggers and recreational athletes. "This is classic, old-school stretching that has been done for generations," Cohen said. "It's going to be very hard to convince people to start doing something different."
There's more news for the traditionalists: research shows static stretching doesn't work as well as more active kinds of stretching that incorporate movement, such as lunges.
In a study published earlier this year in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, Roberto Meroni of the University of Milan and colleagues found people who stretched using conventional techniques, like bending over to touch their toes, were less flexible than those who did a more active type of stretching that used more muscle groups.
Meroni said static stretching simply forces the muscle being stretched to endure the pain of that stretch. With active stretches that work more muscles, the stretched muscles learn to extend while another group is working.
Those types of stretches are commonly used in yoga, which emphasizes how the body is aligned during stretches, not just flexibility. Many yoga poses involve the whole body and focus not only on stretching a particular muscle, but the ligaments, tendons and joints around it.
Still, experts don't discount static stretching entirely. Lynn Millar, a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine, said they recommend people stretch several times a week and that most types of stretching work.
Maximizing the benefits of stretching may simply boil down to a matter of when you do it and how, according to Jonny Booth, a health and fitness manager at a north London branch of gym chain Fitness First.
"If you are going to stretch your muscles and then do some intense training, you're not going to get fantastic results," he said.
Instead, Booth recommends active stretches that mimic the movement of your intended activity, like some deep knee lunges while walking for runners.
"Stretching is vital to become more flexible," Booth said. "But it has to be done at the right time and for the right reasons."
Stretching: The Truth
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
WHEN DUANE KNUDSON, a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Chico, looks around campus at athletes warming up before practice, he sees one dangerous mistake after another. “They’re stretching, touching their toes. . . . ” He sighs. “It’s discouraging.”
If you’re like most of us, you were taught the importance of warm-up exercises back in grade school, and you’ve likely continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds - known as static stretching - primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did after not stretching at all. Other studies have found that this stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. Also, stretching one leg’s muscles can reduce strength in the other leg as well, probably because the central nervous system rebels against the movements.
“There is a neuromuscular inhibitory response to static stretching,” says Malachy McHugh, the director of research at the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. The straining muscle becomes less responsive and stays weakened for up to 30 minutes after stretching, which is not how an athlete wants to begin a workout.
THE RIGHT WARM-UP should do two things: loosen muscles and tendons to increase the range of motion of various joints, and literally warm up the body. When you’re at rest, there’s less blood flow to muscles and tendons, and they stiffen. “You need to make tissues and tendons compliant before beginning exercise,” Knudson says.
A well-designed warm-up starts by increasing body heat and blood flow. Warm muscles and dilated blood vessels pull oxygen from the bloodstream more efficiently and use stored muscle fuel more effectively. They also withstand loads better. One significant if gruesome study found that the leg-muscle tissue of laboratory rabbits could be stretched farther before ripping if it had been electronically stimulated - that is, warmed up.
To raise the body’s temperature, a warm-up must begin with aerobic activity, usually light jogging. Most coaches and athletes have known this for years. That’s why tennis players run around the court four or five times before a match and marathoners stride in front of the starting line. But many athletes do this portion of their warm-up too intensely or too early. A 2002 study of collegiate volleyball players found that those who’d warmed up and then sat on the bench for 30 minutes had lower backs that were stiffer than they had been before the warm-up. And a number of recent studies have demonstrated that an overly vigorous aerobic warm-up simply makes you tired. Most experts advise starting your warm-up jog at about 40 percent of your maximum heart rate (a very easy pace) and progressing to about 60 percent. The aerobic warm-up should take only 5 to 10 minutes, with a 5-minute recovery. (Sprinters require longer warm-ups, because the loads exerted on their muscles are so extreme.) Then it’s time for the most important and unorthodox part of a proper warm-up regimen, the Spider-Man and its counterparts.
“TOWARDS THE end of my playing career, in about 2000, I started seeing some of the other guys out on the court doing these strange things before a match and thinking, What in the world is that?” says Mark Merklein, 36, once a highly ranked tennis player and now a national coach for the United States Tennis Association. The players were lunging, kicking and occasionally skittering, spider-like, along the sidelines. They were early adopters of a new approach to stretching.
While static stretching is still almost universally practiced among amateur athletes - watch your child’s soccer team next weekend - it doesn’t improve the muscles’ ability to perform with more power, physiologists now agree. “You may feel as if you’re able to stretch farther after holding a stretch for 30 seconds,” McHugh says, “so you think you’ve increased that muscle’s readiness.” But typically you’ve increased only your mental tolerance for the discomfort of the stretch. The muscle is actually weaker.
Stretching muscles while moving, on the other hand, a technique known as dynamic stretching or dynamic warm-ups, increases power, flexibility and range of motion. Muscles in motion don’t experience that insidious inhibitory response. They instead get what McHugh calls “an excitatory message” to perform.
Dynamic stretching is at its most effective when it’s relatively sports specific. “You need range-of-motion exercises that activate all of the joints and connective tissue that will be needed for the task ahead,” says Terrence Mahon, a coach with Team Running USA, home to the Olympic marathoners Ryan Hall and Deena Kastor. For runners, an ideal warm-up might include squats, lunges and “form drills” like kicking your buttocks with your heels. Athletes who need to move rapidly in different directions, like soccer, tennis or basketball players, should do dynamic stretches that involve many parts of the body. “Spider-Man” is a particularly good drill: drop onto all fours and crawl the width of the court, as if you were climbing a wall. (For other dynamic stretches, see the sidebar below.)
Even golfers, notoriously nonchalant about warming up (a recent survey of 304 recreational golfers found that two-thirds seldom or never bother), would benefit from exerting themselves a bit before teeing off. In one 2004 study, golfers who did dynamic warm- up exercises and practice swings increased their clubhead speed and were projected to have dropped their handicaps by seven strokes over seven weeks.
Controversy remains about the extent to which dynamic warm-ups prevent injury. But studies have been increasingly clear that static stretching alone before exercise does little or nothing to help. The largest study has been done on military recruits; results showed that an almost equal number of subjects developed lower-limb injuries (shin splints, stress fractures, etc.), regardless of whether they had performed static stretches before training sessions. A major study published earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control, on the other hand, found that knee injuries were cut nearly in half among female collegiate soccer players who followed a warm-up program that included both dynamic warm-up exercises and static stretching. (For a sample routine, visit www.aclprevent.com/pepprogram.htm.) And in golf, new research by Andrea Fradkin, an assistant professor of exercise science at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, suggests that those who warm up are nine times less likely to be injured.
“It was eye-opening,” says Fradkin, formerly a feckless golfer herself. “I used to not really warm up. I do now.”
Stretching before exercise can lead to less flexibility, tighter muscles, and injury. Yes, stretching is important. However, it is only useful and necessary when performed after a work out or activity. Ask yourself, what is the purpose of a warm up? Simple right, to warm up our body and prepare our muscles for the action to come. Well, stretching does not warm up our muscles! And ironically, stretching cold muscles can cause rather than prevent an injury. When our muscles are cold, or in their natural state, they are rigid. This inflexibility makes them sensitive to any strains or changes in length, and therefore susceptible to over-extension. However, once our body temperature is up and blood flows to our muscles, they are ready to take advantage of the benefits of a relaxing, cool down stretch. Think of a raw piece of spaghetti; if you were to bend it, it would snap in half. But, once you “warm it up,” it will bend any way desired.
