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Home :: Muscle & Fitness
The lazy way to improve your flexibility without any stretching...
If you're anything like most people, you probably spend some time stretching,
either before or after exercise.
For many, stretching is almost a religion. Over the years, stretching
has been promoted as a way to reduce your risk of injury, improve exercise
performance, and ease muscle pain after exercise.
Stretching
Such is the popularity of stretching as a way to prevent injury, it's
rare to hear anyone question its value. Yet, despite almost universal
acceptance, there's very little evidence to show that stretching before
exercise has any impact on injury prevention.
Moreover, although stretching is traditionally seen as the best way to
increase your flexibility, you can improve your flexibility without
stretching - useful if you've only got a very limited amount of time available
to train.
Put yourself in the shoes of a scientist designing a study to test whether
stretching reduces the risk of injury. At the start of the study, you'd
probably ask your subjects to complete a questionnaire describing what
kind of stretching they did. Then, you'd divide the subjects into two
groups - perhaps stretchers, and non-stretchers.
Over a period of several months, you'd simply record how many injuries
occurred in each group. At the end of the study, you'd have a good idea
of whether or not stretching worked to reduce the risk of injury.
Simple, right? Not really.
Firstly, if your subjects were stretching more regularly, they may have
been more careful about what else they did. Maybe they spent more time
warming up. Perhaps they were eating a better diet, or paid more attention
to exercise technique. Any link between stretching (or flexibility) and
injury might simply indicate a more "devoted" subject.
Flexibility
It's also difficult to distinguish between the short- and long-term
effects of stretching. When you stretch, it usually leads to an...
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