You’re Probably Wasting Your Time Stretching
Like many of us, you were probably told to stretch more. I used to tell every single person I worked with to stretch every day. Over time this has been not necessarily bad advice, but not good advice either. Static stretching isn’t a bad thing and there are cases when it is appropriate to do, always listen to your medical team, I’m not a doctor and this isn’t medical advice. However like all training you have to consider the goal of the program, and be mindful of how your allocating your time. In many cases people are spending too much time static stretching when they could be productively working towards their goals.
What is really happening when you static stretch is two things. You temporarily increase your range of motion (ROM). If your stretching is fairly intense you’ll lose the short term ROM gains after an hour, but in most cases you’ll be back to your normal passive ROM before then. You can also increase ROM over the long term, this is more of a “learning effect”, you’re teaching your muscles, tendons, and ligaments to relax under longer ranges of motion, basically increasing the pain tolerance. Without consistent flexibility training this adaptation will be lost over time. You do not lengthen anything, the structures in your body do not change with static stretching.
When you want to improve your mobility in something, you should have a specific goal. Like all training, mobility training follows the principle of specificity. If you want to improve your squat depth, your best bet is to perform the squat to the lowest depth you can maintain your desired form. It seems that 30 seconds is the best length to hold these stretches, longer doesn’t provide much if any added benefit, and pushing to a painful point is unnecessary, only go to the point you get that stretching feeling. Combining specific stretching with Full ROM strength training, is what will really get you permanent mobility results, because strength training does actually change the structure of your muscles.
General stretching does feel good, it’s completely okay to do for the temporary relief. I would skip static stretching in your workouts warm-up because it can increase injury risk and decrease performance. Stretching after a workout doesn’t decrease your risk of injury. Also if you’ve been stretching and stretching and just not making any progress, you may have a some kind of soft tissue restriction, poor technique, or you’ve hit your genetic limit for mobility.
So if you’ve been racking your brain on how to get your workouts in because a warm-up, workout, and stretching, take way too long you can cut out or cut back on the stretching and spend your time doing things that will push the needle forward.
