Does stretching really help improve flexibility and prevent injury?

For most of us, the benefits of stretching before exercise have been drummed into us from an early age.  Stretching improves our flexibility and helps prevent injuries, doesn’t it? However when we delve a little deeper beyond this common assumption it turns out this might not be the case.  But it also can be the case sometimes! 

THE CONTROLLER

General consensus is that if you stretch a tight area hard enough and for long enough, it will lengthen, becoming more supple and preventing injury. However, if we delve into the research we invariably find this is not true. Our muscles are not like clay to be moulded as we wish. In fact, muscle does not define its own length at all, it is the controller of all; the nervous system!

To put it another way, under anaesthetic (removing the nervous system from control), all muscles miraculously gain full length and complete suppleness, all with no stretching at all.  The length of a muscle is not a physical restraint but actually an emergency breaking system controlled by our nervous system.

Essentially the nervous system is ensuring the muscle does not go beyond normal range. If muscles approach the end of normal range, emergency braking is applied hence rigid resistance, because the brain does not feel safe going further. Forcing muscles further into a stretch will only result in even shorter muscles or injury, as the brain resists.

FREQUENCY vs INTENSITY

The change in approach we need to champion is essentially the difference between frequency and intensity.  In other words what we are doing most of the time in a day totally beats what we do for very short intense periods i.e. whilst stretching.

“What we do most of the time totally trumps what we do whilst stretching.” 

Sitting all day long results in our hamstrings being held in a chronically shortened state.  Adapting to this behaviour, our muscles change at a cellular level, modelling themselves to this chair shape as this is the new normal.  To put this in simpler terms ‘use it or lose it’, our muscles grow to the shape that is our normal!

THE SOLUTION

There are many ways we can transform our muscles but it needs to become part of the everyday rather than 10 minutes at the end of the day. For example use a standing desk or sit on the floor in the evening with your legs straight out in front rat her than the sofa. The possibilities are endless, with a few pointers:

·      The old adage ‘No pain no gain’ is wrong, instead use the goldilocks principle ‘not too much, not too little, but just enough’.

·      Stretching tight bits doesn’t work, instead long term change in everyday life is needed.

·      Exercising and stretching is not something we can place in a perfect parcel at the end of the day, it is our constant movement that determines our shape and flexibility.

·      Being bendy is not always good, hypermobility can be just as bad, so good functional length is best.