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Stretching before or after a workout: Only one of them is right
Even though most of us probably don't work on it enough, flexibility is vital to overall health, and it's especially important in connection to your exercise routine. While all stretching may seem the same, there are important distinctions about what stretching routines to perform at different points of your workout.
Working out already feels like an onerous task, and the thousands of opinions on the internet about how to exercise in the correct way aren't helping. You've probably heard tons of conflicting advice surrounding your workout routine, and when there's voices shouting in all directions around you it's far easier to just give up and push off the gym for another day.
One part of exercising I often hear disagreements on is stretching. Some people are vehemently opposed to the idea, saying that the practice is bunk and a waste of time. Others swear by it, believing that stretching is vitally important and helps ward off all kinds of injuries. Even for those in the pro-stretching camp, there are differing opinions on whether to stretch before or after your workout.
I'm here to dispel the confusion once and for all and explain how exactly stretching should fit into your exercise habits so that you can finally get back to what's really important -- actually working out.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday October 22 2019, @01:20PM (8 children)
So where does that leave us, anywhow.
The spoiler in a one line answer: stretch after exercising. Read the article to learn some about why.
My additional comment is to stretch occasionally, but consistently, even if you don't exercise and never intend to exercise in a way that would make one ask the question we've answered.
It shouldn't be either do it after excercise or don't, since stretching itself can become a kind of exercise (think yoga, ballet, football players trying to stay limber, martial arts, etc... stretching is both feminine and masculine, even if some on either side of that won't admit pro football players often take ballet classes to learn how to stay limber...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2019, @01:46PM (1 child)
yeah. I'd say it's criminal negligence to tell someone they don't need to stretch before jumping in freezing water. but whatever.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 23 2019, @06:43AM
Now I never wanted to jump in freezing water, but assuming that one day I should, for whatever reason, want to do that, I don't see why I should first tell someone they don't need to stretch. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 22 2019, @01:53PM (2 children)
I've been having to do it at least eight or ten times a day lately. Been renovating a church into a house and full days of construction type work builds a hell of a lot of upper body muscle pretty damned quick if you're not used to it. That part's nice but the shiny, new muscle mass will be massively limited in its range of motion if you don't keep it stretched out.
It's also going to be swollen (beyond just adding bulk) for a little while, which sucks ass if we're talking hand/wrist/forearm muscle and you have RSI issues to begin with. Which is why I haven't been spending hardly any time coding SN stuff for a long time. By spending 5-10 minutes stretching the muscles and nerves from shoulder to fingers every time I step out to have a cigarette, I've just about got myself back to a state I can work from. So I should be able to start back up some time this winter after we get all moved in.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2019, @11:01PM (1 child)
I have chronic tendinosis and one thing that helps a ton is to splint, immobilize, and support when I'm not using those tendons. So if I were to spend all day hammering, I'd wear my thinner wrist splint to keep the tendons from having to absorb all the force themselves. The splints also help me maintain the correct ergonomic angles when typing and doing other activities. Note, you don't want full immobilization splints because then other joints and muscles in your arm and shoulder can wear out from compensating. If the thought of not being "manly" enough stops you, like it did to me, my doctor showed me "Strongmen" competitions because the first thing they do is splint and support all their joints before every rep because they know just how fragile they are.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday October 23 2019, @01:36PM
You can splint the wrist but you can't do much of anything about any muscles involved in your grip except stretch them out again.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 22 2019, @02:05PM
My kids' high school homework often includes questions like: which one of these is opinion?
Just because you have experience and logic to back up an opinion does not magically transform it into fact.
Something as "soft" as when to stretch is always going to carry a bit of opinion / personal preference / statistical uncertainty a long with it. Real life is far too messy to collect concrete infallible data for A/B comparisons, and "studies" of this nature are perpetually underfunded to collect sufficiently high N for the low quality of their experimental controls.
Finally, some behavior can transform the subjects to where: the group that stretches regularly before exercise benefits most from stretching before exercise, whereas the group that stretches regularly after exercise benefits most from stretching after... attempting to change a behavior to a "better" one can backfire and negate the benefits of the change, whether due to measurable explainable physiological phenomenon, or softer behavioral ones.
In the real world: do you even lift? Some exercise, with or without stretching, would benefit a large group of the population who are approaching risk of couch-sitting ulcers.
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(Score: 1) by Jay on Tuesday October 22 2019, @02:53PM
Digging into the article, it matches my experience pretty well.
Like most of us, I have an 8hr sit-down job. Before I work out, I absolutely need a bit of a warm-up stretch. I need to get some deep knee bends in. My hamstrings tugged on a little. My shoulders pulled in various directions and some of the stiffness shaken out. This light dynamic stretching makes all the difference. My pre-workout stretching is maybe 2 minutes, tops. Just enough to get things moving, and unfrozen from a day without enough moving around.
Post-workout, it really depends on whether or not I've blasted muscles to the point of seizing up and failing. There are times when I've worked hard but not to the point of failure. I don't really see (or feel) a benefit to stretching then. There are other times when I've got muscles just seized up and inoperable. Then some slow, deep stretching makes a world of difference, as I coax them to relax and unwind.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 22 2019, @11:35PM
Well, if I'm doing stifflegged deadlifts with dumbbells, "stretching" without any weights is kinda by definition exercise.
For weightlifting I'm not sure stretching prevents anything bad but it is kinda a test of range of motion if you've hurt yourself very slightly and would like to avoid worse in the near future when holding 100+ pounds of cast iron.