Since your first soccer practice at age five, people have been harping on you to stretch before and after activity. However, at your current stage in life you’ve given up all aspirations of being a world-class gymnast and, let’s face it, you probably don’t stretch as often as you should. Perhaps not at all. So what’s the big deal? Why all the fuss over stretching, anyway?
DOMS Reduction
Flexibility aside, there are other, more immediate benefits to stretching. DOMS – Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness – is that tenderness in your muscles you’ve felt the day after a good workout or boot camp. It has been said that by stretching after activity, you can decrease the intensity of your DOMS.
The body’s natural response to prolonged stretching (i.e. holding the stretch for more than 20 seconds) is a reduction in muscle tension. By doing this after a workout, when muscle tension is high, you may increase your odds of getting out of bed the next morning.
Injury Prevention
There is much debate, especially among the running community, over whether stretching can decrease your chance of injury. The short answer is: that would depend on the type of injury.
If you’re jogging at dusk and roll your ankle in a pothole (rare as they may be in Winnipeg…) increased flexibility is unlikely to prevent that sprain from happening. If you’re playing street hockey and someone slap-shots the puck straight into your thigh, again, having nice loose quads won’t stop the bruising. These are what we call acute injuries. Some outside force is acting on your body over the course of a few seconds to produce injury.
Chronic injuries are a different story. A chronic injury is one that comes on slowly over an extended period, like carpal tunnel syndrome. It could take days, weeks, even months of repetitive stress on a body part to produce this type of injury. Chronic injuries are very preventable, and stretching is often a key component in their prevention and rehabilitation. Stretching the calves, for example, can keep conditions like Achilles tendonitis at bay. Even some kinds of headaches result from muscle tension in the neck, and can be managed with stretching.
The problem with chronic injuries is that they can take as long to heal as it takes for them to develop. So make your stretching proactive, not reactive! Stretch to treat the injuries that aren’t slowing you down yet.
The Method
Any stretching that you do immediately before exercise should be brief – hold these stretches for about five seconds. For the sake of performance, you don’t want to cause too much relaxation in those muscles before you make them work.
After activity, you should hold each stretch for at least twenty seconds. At this point you are trying to achieve muscle relaxation, and perhaps even see some long-term flexibility gains. Remember; stretching should never be painful. Pull just until you feel a light stretch and hold at that point.
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Nope! The nice thing about stretching is that, when performed properly, you can do it as often as you like without negative effects like DOMS. For folks like the afore-mentioned world-class gymnast, hyper mobility in the joints caused by being too flexible can be problematic, but the average person doesn’t need to worry about becoming overly flexible.
~ Amanda
CSEP-CPT
