A stretching habit isn’t doing much of what people hope

A relative of mine is an Alexander Technique teacher. My understanding of stretching, from them, is that:

- The main point of stretching is to improve your range of motion, for injury prevention. For example, if your hamstrings are too tight to bend at the knees and hips, you can injure your back trying to pick things up off the ground. (Corrolary: If you're already flexible enough to bend your joints in the proper ways, you don't need to stretch much; just enough to maintain that flexibility). - Stretching before exercise is mostly pointless; a warm-up is far more important. After exercise is the best time to stretch, while your muscles are still warm & loose. - The proper way to stretch is to move right up to the edge of your range of motion, then relax. It should be slightly uncomfortable, but NOT painful -- that's because pain prevents you from relaxing; "feeling the burn" is a good way to injure yourself. - Short stretches are not very effective (though of course they can still feel good). Stretches should be held for a few minutes. When you release the stretch, the muscle should feel pleasantly warm.

That is to say, many people stretch terribly wrong. Thus, unless the studies cited also taught people to stretch correctly, I would expect them to show no benefit from stretching.

I looked at the abstracts of a couple of the studies cited but could not ascertain how participants were told to stretch. I'd appreciate if anyone wants to spend the time to dig into the research a bit more and figure out whether any of it contradicts my relative or whether it merely supports the claim that incorrect stretching is basically useless.

I wish they'd make more of a distinction between pre- and post-exercise stretching. As I understand it, pre-exercise stretching really is pretty useless if not outright harmful. That's what the article seems to focus on, but it's maddeningly vague. OTOH, I haven't heard such a severe indictment of post-exercise stretching. It's what I do. I run more than 95% of other runners who enter 1000 km/year challenges that enable me to make such comparisons, and that's already a pretty self-selected group. I've had one serious encounter with plantar fasciitis, lesser incidents of ankle or knee tenderness, and occasionally some mild shin splints. I feel like some simple stretches - nothing aggressive or elaborate - after each run have helped with some of these. Perhaps stretching really is over-hyped, but this article seems just as questionable on the other side.

When I got into lifting I was told not to do static stretches like quad pulls or arm across chest ect but to work on dynamic stretches like leg swings and foam rolling just to get blood flowing to those areas and then to do static stretches after the lifting session if you really want to. The idea I was told was that stretching cold is just like pulling on a cold rubber band; its easier to snap.

Flexibility is a good-enough reason for me.

In group exercise, stretching performs an extremely useful function: giving people who arrive early something to do while waiting for others. For this reason alone, it will survive and thrive in this context no matter how much evidence stacks up suggesting it doesn't have the purported benefits.

You can't kick high if you can't stretch high, so martial prowess is the first counter-example I can think of.

I had shin splints really bad everytime I ran. The minute I started stretching first I never got shin splints again. So it's anecdotal but in my limited scientific experiment stretching has 100% success rate.

If anybody on here runs marathons you might know a guy named David Goggins. He's an ultra marathon runner and a former Navy Seal. The guy had major health problems I believe after leaving Navy and he attributes his recovery to 8 hours of stretching every single day (he eventually cut it down to 2 hours). The man is an amazing endurance athlete in general. Highly recommend checking out his story.

Edit: here is the link where he talks about it [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSpaBN63ovk

I've had neck pain for the past few years. After visiting a number of doctors and physiotherapists and having an MRI to help diagnose - I was recommended strong anti-inflammatory medicine and massages. While it helped, this was a persistent problem. Ultimately it wasn't until I started building a routine of stretching and building strength that I've started to overcome it. I have a feeling it might be a similar circumstance to our discovery of Myopia prevention; we had evidence to suggest sunlight helped, but not a true understanding of the mechanics until recently. Stretching might not be the solution by itself, but maintaining and improving mobility is a stepping stone to healthy muscles.

As far as I understand from years of body building, stretching helps mostly with the recovery, after the fact, often the next day, with some very light weights - redoing the same execercise as yesterday with stretches will improve recovery time.

Can't be further from the truth. Not even going to read the article.

I've experienced enough disfunction from a lack of stretching to know how useful stretching is if you lift weights. Hell, just sitting down too often necessitates stretching, lest your psoas shrink from the position. It would be like limiting the range of motion of your elbow for long periods of time; eventually that bicep is going to shrink longitudinally (lengthwise).

Limitations on range of motion like this lead to situations where it's easier to hyper-extend that muscle, i.e. overstretch it in a short (split second) period of time.

To be specific, I used to deadlift frequently, but I didn't stretch later on, and eventually just the simple act of putting on socks caused me to hyper-extend my rhomboids or something back there. Put me out of commission for a bit such that even biking became impossible without excruciating pain afterwards.

I've been thinking trigger point therapy is pseudoscience for a while. I doubt it is possible to stretch the IT band. If it was possible couldn't you over stretch it?

This makes sense intuitively (and also isn't new news).

Animals don't stretch. They do fast however (against their will of course). Which one is probably better, the natural or forced one?

One question that remains is regarding dynamic stretching. What does everyone think?