Running magazines have long extolled the virtues of stretching, so much so that it’s become an accepted part of many exercise routines. Most runners partake in some form of “static” stretching, where you pull your body into position, grit your teeth and watch the clock for 30-60 seconds. However there’s a growing school of thought among exercise physiologists, that stretching makes little difference and can even reduce performance.
So why do we stretch? As Tamra Llewellyn of the University of Nebraska explains, static stretching has long been seen as a way of warming up, loosening the muscles and preventing injury.
“I think that for a long time people would do stretches thinking that if they had a good range of motion in their muscles and their joints, they shouldn’t get injured,” Llewellyn says. “And to some degree that’s the case, especially in basketball or football where you need to move laterally, and require your entire range of motion. But with running, you’re in one plane the entire time, putting your legs through the same repetitive motion so perhaps it’s not as necessary as we previously thought.”
While you may not realise it, stretching is actually quite a traumatic experience for the body. The pain you experience while holding a stretch comes because you’re actually tearing the tissue fibres at a microscopic level, thus remoulding the tissue into a longer and more flexible form.
Jody Andersen of the University of Tampa feels that intuitively it makes little sense to put the joints and muscles through that before running. “If you took an American-football player, would you run them through a really intense strength training routine before they played because they require power? Of course not, because that power would be drained in the weight room. So while runners require mobility, why would you advise them to do eight minutes of static stretching, before they get ready to run?”
Andersen admits that he used to be a big advocate of static stretching until he realised that it wasn’t really preventing him from picking up the various niggles which runners are prone to. Recent research suggests that a better option is a more dynamic stretching workout before running, working your muscles through some of the ranges of motion they’ll need via skipping or even hopping.
An example of a dynamic stretching regime is the Fifa 11 plus program which many soccer players use to warm-up before training. It involves light jogs, light aerobic workouts and then various exercises which focus on agility.
When it comes to how much stretching you do, the key question is whether you feel you have adequate flexibility for the performance you’re looking to achieve. If you wish to train at a higher intensity you may find you need a bit more mobility in your joints to take your training to the next level. However Andersen warns that, along with mobility, it’s also important to build up strength. You can gain a lot of flexibility but if you can’t control it through each stride, it’s not especially useful.
Stretching is certainly beneficial for runners who have detectable mobility restrictions as this can result in more severe injuries. Runners who suffer from lower-back problems may find that this emanates from stiffness in the hip.
“If there’s an obvious restriction in the movement pattern of a runner, this means their stability through each stride is coming from the stiffness in their body rather than true mobility in their joint or tissue which can lead to injuries,” Andersen says.
“But once again static stretching may not be the best technique to loosen that tissue. Other strategies like roller massage or working with a massage therapist may be the better approach to allow it to organise into a longer form, to allow more efficient movement.”
For runners who are already quite flexible, static stretching can even make them more injury prone by pushing the joint too far, into a position which isn’t optimal for running. Not only that but if you’re concerned about performance, some studies have found that runners with over-stretched muscles run slower.
“The compliance of the tissue is a concern that researchers have been discussing,” Andersen says. “If the tissue is too long and too stretchable, it can’t handle the load that you put on it and won’t give you enough resistance to protect you.”
“We have natural injury-prevention mechanisms where we rely on a certain stiffness in the muscle. For example when you’re running along a trail and you have to get over a stick or something, you’re going to reach out a bit further. But if the tissue’s too compliant, as you’re landing you go through a greater range of motion than you really needed to and you strain a hamstring. This is because the nervous system can’t respond quickly enough and you don’t have that passive stiffness to hold on while it gets into stabilising mode.”
Some runners use static stretching as a means of warming down but while this is certainly more beneficial than stretching before a run, as the muscles are warm, more mobile and relaxed, it is important to be careful.
“If you’ve done a particularly intense and damaging run like an interval workout, a hill workout or a downhill acceleration workout, add a prolonged duration stretch on top of that isn’t a great idea,” Andersen says. “After those kind of runs you need to remember that you’ve got tissue that’s probably already damaged, so it needs time to rest and recover.”
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