Flexible Thinking

Do you stretch before or after exercise? Why?

Do you stretch in the morning or in the evening? Why?

In exercise one of the most mis-understood areas, by both the public and professionals, is stretching. If you look at the sports section in your local books shop you will find many volumes on how to increase your flexibility, if you go to any yoga studio they will tell you that it improves flexibility, the same when you go to the gym or into any martial arts studio. So flexibility must be important?

Ask anyone if they stretch before or after their run and they will give you a confused answer, they often know that they should but they don’t know what to do or why. Often people have been given conflicting information regarding stretching and flexibility.

The most important thing when deciding what to stretch and when, is knowledge. You must know what you want to achieve from your stretching before you begin. Do you want to make your muscles longer or more flexible, are your muscles actually short or are they just carrying too much tension, do you actually need more flexibility or are you just doing what the others in your group are doing?

If you exercise with bad posture then your body will remember that, so stretching muscles that will allow you to go into better posture before you exercise is sensible. So it is a good idea to do postural correction stretching before you exercise. If your sport involves going into extreme positions like martial arts, football, ballet or gymnastics a much more extensive stretching regime should be an essential part of the warm up routine. If your sport does not involve extreme ranges of motion, like distance running or cycling, then it is not usually necessary to do stretching before the activity unless it is to correct a postural deficit or address an injury issue.

Developmental stretching is best done after exercise when the muscle temperature is higher. These stretches can be done as part of a warm-down or at home in the evening. Again for developmental stretching the evening is better than the morning because a warm muscle will respond to stretching more readily than a cold muscle.

Most people stretch muscles that are already normal in length, they do stretches that they are good at, this is normal but this often leads to joint imbalance, instability and injury. At our studio we take a great deal of time assessing and measuring our clients to ensure that the stretches we give are right for them. Stretching a muscle which is already overly long can lead to imbalances across a joint and result in injury.

Some people need to stretch before and after every session to avoid injury, some people never stretch and never get injured. You need to figure out what works for you regardless of what others in your training group are doing, the only thing we guarantee is that your body is different to everyone else’s, so what should you expect the same stretching routine to work?

Alan