If you’ve heard it once, you’ve probably heard it a thousand times from anyone who knows anything about fitness. “Stretching is important.” The benefits of stretching activities are numerous. They increase the ability of your joints to move, lengthens muscle, decreases tightness, and in the right environment, can help with relaxation and stress management. It’s fairly well-established throughout the world that stretching should be a priority for most people; especially those who wish to be physically active.
Pre-workout Considerations
In general, a dynamic warm-up is best, similar to the one seen here. Dynamic warm-ups are essentially a series of movements designed to prepare the body for athletic activities. Good examples are short-duration activities such as jogs, high knees, butt-kicks, lunges, and others. The benefits of doing a dynamic warm-up are that you provide slight increases in flexibility, increase the heart rate, provide increased blood flow to the muscles, all the while retaining the ability of your muscles to contract well. I refer to this as “the spring in your giddyup”. If the muscles are stretched too far before a workout, they essentially lose their elasticity, and performance goes down. All these benefits together will overall decrease one’s risk for injury during exercise activity.
Post-Workout Considerations
After exercising is the ideal time to really work on your flexibility. Your muscles are warm, the blood is flowing, and conditions are optimal to get the greatest extensibility out of your tissues. This is the time where you want to perform your longer hold-style stretching (also known as static stretching). Focus on each muscle one at a time, so you can really concentrate on giving each muscle group the attention it needs. If you have spots that are particularly tight, focus on them a little more, but without over-stretching. A good rule of thumb is to hold each stretch for 30 seconds, and perform it 3 times. Be sure to stretch on each side of the body.
At Active, we have several clinicians who specialize in caring for the injured athlete! If you have questions or concerns about how to be physically active and prevent injury, call us for a complementary injury screen today at any one of our three clinics in the Ishpeming and Marquette areas. You have a choice in Physical Therapy. Choose Active! Get Active. Be Active. Stay Active.