It’s no stretch to say that muscles need to be worked
The Washington Post
Myles Schneider, 74, a semiretired podiatrist who lives in Reston, Va., stretches for a hour, six times a week. Mr. Schneider, who also walks briskly for 45 minutes twice weekly and runs three times a week for 45 minutes in the deep end of a pool, spends more time stretching than he does in actual exercise.
Sixty minutes of slow stretching may seem excessive, but it works for Mr. Schneider.
When he was into distance running in his 20s, he stretched for about 10 minutes before and after his runs. But he always felt rushed. Since reaching his mid-50s, however, he’s been stretching in the late afternoon or early evening.
“After a few minutes, I feel more energized and no longer tired,” he said. “I also really notice myself relaxing mentally, especially if I’m stressed-out about something. Also, I’m certainly more flexible than I was 20 years ago.”
Exercise dogma long has extolled the value of stretching, usually as a warmup before exercise or as a cool-down afterward. By not bracketing stretching to his workouts, Mr. Schneider skirts the debate over whether slow stretching — known as “static” stretching — helps or hinders sports performance.
From the 1960s to the late 1990s, fitness professionals firmly believed that static stretching was a useful adjunct before exercise, warming up the muscles and, in doing so, preventing injury. Later, however, research suggested the opposite was true — that it caused muscle fatigue and slower sprinting times in elite athletes. This prompted many of them to abandon it for “dynamic” stretching, which looks more like real exercise. Today, many experts think a combination of both before a vigorous workout or competition is the best approach.
To understand the controversy, it’s important to know what happens at the muscles’ cellular level during static stretching.
“Our muscles are made of thousands of muscle spindles — like hairs in a ponytail — that give the muscle cell the ability to stretch and contract by sliding past each other in a coordinated fashion,” said Michael Jonesco, an assistant clinical professor of sports medicine and internal medicine at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center. “Static stretching pulls on the cell to the max, and can cause some stretch injury that takes time to recover, and can therefore cause a temporary drop in performance.”
Dynamic stretching, on the other hand, puts the muscles in motion repetitively, and “is essentially preparing your muscle in a gradually progressive fashion to do the job you want it to do,” said Edward Laskowski, a physical