This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Exercise, Stretching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
When are we supposed to stretch? It can get a bit confusing. Is it before the workout? After the workout? The warm-up before the workout is the easy bit, but should it be before or after the stretch?
Do Warm-Ups First
You should always do your warm-ups before a stretch. If you stretch cold muscles you can actually injure yourself. By warming up the muscles on let’s say a bike first (if you’re training your legs – Beeble) or doing a very light upper body workout e.g. shadow boxing or arm bike (if you’re training your upper body – Beeble); you bring blood to the muscles which in turn helps to physically warm the muscles up. Warmer muscles are far more elastic and make the body more supple and therefore can be stretched much more easily and safely.
Advantages of Stretching
To be honest when doing gym work, if you’re not too tight, you don’t have to worry too much about the stretch. That is not to say you shouldn’t do it, but because the majority of gym work is linear and controlled it is not as important as it would be for a sports person before a game or even before an aerobics or gym class. These use ‘ballistic’ movements (movements that take your body to its extreme limits, where injury is far more likely - Beeble) especially in contact sports, which put much more pressure on the muscles and body as a whole than using a treadmill or stationary bike. However having said that, ideally we should all stretch before any exercise and warm up.
Why should you warm up and stretch before exercise?
The main reason is to prevent injury. Using a muscle that is not ready could very likely pull it beyond what it is capable of, causing either injury to the muscle itself or more seriously the ligaments and tendons (much more serious because these will never really heal after you injure them). Another reason is to prepare the body and mind for what is ahead. You will get a lot more out of your session if you warm up and stretch first, it gives you time to focus and prepare the body for a good 100% committed workout. When you warm up and stretch you actually make your muscles longer. If you go into your training session with longer muscles it will mean that you will train them through a much larger range of motion. This will be of greater benefit for your body and will create nicer looking muscles - and since they will be trained in a longer position they will be stronger because more of the muscle will get trained and as more of the muscle is trained the more energy is needed for the movements increasing the fat burning potential.
The benefits of the warm up and stretch mean that you will get the most from your time in the gym, so you really should be performing those routines every time you have a workout. (Don’t forget to stretch at the end of your workout as this is the perfect time because the muscles will be very warm and forgiving and will stretch more than normal plus all the contracting of muscle means that if you don’t stretch your muscles will become very much shortened causing possible future injuries – Beeble)
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