Stretching Before Or After Exercise?

There is a lot of confusion regarding whether or not stretching before and after exercising is required.

The other day I met a woman outside an Ayurveda centre (I was there to get a head massage) and while waiting for the cab we started chatting. She told me she was there to get treatment for her nerves. As we started talking further she told me that she was a fitness freak and used to lift really heavy weights without stretching and suffered from some nerve damage issues because of that.

This scared the hell out of me!! I too lift weights and even I was not very fond of stretching before my workouts. So, the next day I started looking up anything and everything I could find about stretching and why do we need to stretch?

So here is a gist of everything that I came across and what I personally think we should do about stretching. Almost every article had emphasised on basically two things.

Importance of Stretching: What Everyone Says

If you are not new to working out in a gym your trainer must have told you a zillion times to stretch before you workout and if you are curious enough to ask why most likely he would have given these two reasons:

1. To Prevent Risk of Injury during workouts

Stretching makes your muscles flexible and it reduces your chance of injury.

2. To Reduce Muscle Soreness after workouts and have a faster recovery

Your body builds up lactic acid after a workout and stretching help to get rid of it faster so you are ready for your next session.

These are facts that are well known and well accepted throughout the fitness industry. Whether you are doing strength training, running a few miles or just playing a sport, your trainer or coach will always make sure you stretch before starting. But is this actually required? Do you really need to Stretch?

Also Read: Tabata Training- The 4 Minute Workout To A Leaner Body

What does Science say?

There are tons and tons of research papers that claim that stretching has no significant effect on reducing injury or reducing muscle soreness. For example, a study which analysed the data from five different studies by searching Medline (1966 to February 2000), Embase (1988 to February 2000), CINAHL (1982 to January 2000), SPORTDiscus (1949 to December 1999) and PEDro (to February 2000).

The study was conducted on army recruits for a period of 12 weeks. The pre-exercise stretching used in the studies to see the effect on muscle soreness consisted of 2 to 10 repetitions held for 20 to 120 seconds for up to 4 days after exercise. The post-exercise stretching consisted of 4 to 10 repetitions held for 30 to 120 seconds.

There was on an average just a 2% reduction in soreness over the first 72 hours after exercise. These results are quite demotivating to those stretching, after all a 2% reduction is hardly any reduction.

As far as stretching to reduce muscle injury is concerned there was just a slight 5% reduction which is again not much. And since the study had army recruits who have higher injury risk the 5% reduction will be even lower for athletes who have lower injury risk. For those who just workout for just maintaining their health hardly anything is going to trickle down.

Not only this study but most studies claim that stretching has no significant effect on either reducing muscle soreness or reducing injury.

So Is Stretching Finally Not Important?

If you don't like stretching by this time you must be thinking about giving up on it altogether. Well not so soon!!!

While studies like these claim that there is no significant benefit of stretching, what we need to understand is all these studies have their own limitations. If you have ever read any of these studies completely, they always point to some limitations and no study will ever recommend that stretching should not be done.

They are based on a small sample of specific people who used some specific type of stretching and whether they did stretch completely or not is not even measurable. Plus even if stretching did not have these particular benefits it does have some other non-controversial benefits.

Also Read: Intermittent Fasting: 101

Stretching To Adapt Your Body To Exercising

So, there is a lot of debate about stretching but exercising is something that everyone even “science” accepts is needed to lead a healthy life. So, here is the crux of everything, if you exercise you need to stretch even though it might not help you to recover. Let me explain why?

When you exercise there are periods of contraction that occur in your muscles. Over time the skeletal muscles remodel themselves in response to these contractions. Not just muscular structure exercising also remodels our metabolism and physiology. The mechanisms that govern the adaptation of our body to exercising alters our protein content, enzyme activity, and even DNA binding. (1)

A study shows that there are six variables that aid the body to remodel itself in response to exercise: timing of nutritional intake, type of exercise, massage, sleep, low-dose creatine and stretching.

Another study shows that when a muscle is stretched using different techniques such as static, dynamic, or proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretching there may be some short-term changes in the muscle. After stretching the initial performance changes for the first few hours if the activity requires a higher joint range of motion and it persists for 60 to 90 minutes.

One of the most effective methods to decrease muscle stiffness before working out is to increase muscle temperature with warm-up activities such as jogging, cycling etc. This also increases the maximum strain and stress the muscle can endure before an injury.

According to one study from the point of maximising muscular performance, stretching actually decreases performance, therefore stretching should not normally be recommended before exercising to healthy individuals, but be done during the cool-down period after exercising. However, this could just be an exaggeration as the reduction in performance may be negligible.

The Ideal Stretching Type For You

There are three basic types of stretching static, Dynamic, and Pre-Contraction stretches. The most commonly practiced stretching type is static stretching, where a specific muscle is stretched in a particular position till the point of mild discomfort for at least 30 seconds.

There are 2 types of dynamic stretching: active and ballistic stretching. Active stretching involves the movement of a limb through its full range of motion and repeating this several times.

Proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretching is of several different types. Typically PNF involves holding a stretch while contracting and relaxing the muscle.

If You Are An Athlete

If you are an athlete who requires quick and powerful movement and even a few seconds mean a lot to you a dynamic warmup is better suited to you than a static warmup. Dynamic warmup increases body temperature and a slightly stretched muscle gives better speed and agility times.

For Others

If you are just working out to have a healthy lifestyle it's your personal choice. However, stretching after workouts is said to calm your mind and the muscles are warm so this is the best time to stretch.

Also Read: Carb Cycling- What Is It and How It Helps To Lose Weight?

The Best Of Both Worlds

What I think is the best choice to make after going through all the pros and cons of stretching is to follow a mix of light warmup activities like jogging or cycling and stretching before exercising (After all a slight reduction in performance won't hurt you if you are just looking for a healthy lifestyle. ) and static stretching after workout.

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