Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong | Hacker News Reader

Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong

tylertringas.com

114 pointssarimkx40 comments

I want to believe stuff like this, but the whole field is so mired in quackery and jingo it's hard to believe any of it. A PT with a radical personal theory, plus some youtubers and instagram influencers hardly inspires confidence. At least there are no doctors writing pop health books! But some studies in some scientific journal would be great.

That said, holding stretches longer and focusing on relaxing while stretching hardly seems risky, and could be worth a try.

It does sound interesting and reasonable. Something to try.

(but yes, all those links are sponsored links)

> I want to believe stuff like this, but the whole field is so mired in quackery and jingo it's hard to believe any of it.

Haha yes I just saw a youtube video last night of a personal account that said something that seemed to directly contradict what the author of this post learned ("static stretches don't work" whereas this author is saying they worked for him).

I feel like for these kinds of cases where there is contradictory information that it is better to rely on direct experience in my own body rather than just scientific information about what's supposed to work. Use mindful awareness to feel directly what's happening in the muscles and tissues and how it changes over time using the different types of techniques. Then I don't really need to believe anything anyone says. The downside of this approach is that we may miss out on important information if we're ONLY relying on direct experience. But direct experience should be the foundation in my opinion.

I would say your foundation should be the science and you can fine tune to your personal experience. If you're starting from personal experience you're just going to miss out on the wealth of pre-existing knowledge and are likely very far from optimal if not completely wasting your time. AKA reinventing the wheel.

This would be similar to going to the gym and trying to figure out what works for you for gaining strength or muscle mass while ignoring the research/existing knowledge. Very likely you'll get nowhere. The proper approach is to do the research, start from a well supported base, and then fine tune to your own body/requirements.

I mean yeah, but we never start from nothing of course! Totally agree. But our experience should always be the ground truth we test against and if the science disagrees then we should hold the science lightly or ignore it. But if the science offers us something that works in our direct experience then great! And there is a progressive feedback loop as we continue to notice more about our experience and also learn more from research. That's been my experience anyway :)

The science supports that holding stretches longer helps. But it's hardly the best way to stretch vs. something like PNF. But sure, there's no downside other than taking more time and it's pretty standard in Yoga practices as well FWIW.

I don’t think there’s any harm in stretching more, longer and better.

Take a look at people walking out of yoga studios some time. They look fit, move well and seem healthy at rates far more than other people their age.

That was enough reason for me.

(With the usual caveat any good yoga instructor will give “never overdo it” or direct from the yoga sutras “relax the intensity of your efforts, because This. Never. Ends.”)

The rather incomplete list of things I've worked out I was doing with improper form in my early 20s:

- Standing

- Sitting

- Sleeping

- Exercise

- Doing Nothing

- Diet

- Working Hard

- Compliments

It is a miracle that mankind gets anything complex done given how hard the basics are in practice. People who document their findings like this are a helpful resource.

... now that you claim to know better, do you really think the basics are that hard?

They're really not.

We get coaxed into lots of bad habits by the allure of screens and white collar ambitions, and fail to receive direction against those bad habits in a world that universalizes aristocratic education in Shakespeare, electron orbitals, Kreb's cycles, and calculus, rather than in practical daily skills like cooking, gardening, meditating/praying, or carpentry, but all those things you "were doing with improper form" are easy enough that people had been informally teaching each other to do them plenty well for thousands of millenia.

Frankly, the article itself is most interesting for stating all the weird misconceptions the author had picked up in the first place.

I mean, PT's are trained to rehab specific injuries and disabilities, not to help gym bros address their vague and subjective sense of being kinda stiff. Obviously, he's not alone in it, but I'd love to hear where he got that idea into his head in the first place and accepted it so strongly that he feels like he needs to apologize for challenging it.

I think the basics are hard because what we are meant to do as humans (move, forage, hunt, sleep after dark) are at odds with modern civilization (be sedentary, live in large cities, too much rich/processed food, stay up late, and more)

You know you can still do all those things in the first parenthetical and not do all those things in the second, right?

"Modern civilization" (its institutions, medicine, economies, etc) doesn't demand any of those latter ones, nor does it preclude any of the former. Your choice to lean more into one set than the other is just a personal one, akin to fashion. If the latter are encouraged by anything, it's just by act of media and misguided education.

I assure you that you can still be an intellectually stimulated and commercially successful engineer (or whatever) while adhering pretty much entirely to the first set, which many do, and it's actually a quite pleasant, stable, and easy way to live.

> but all those things you "were doing with improper form" are easy enough that people had been informally teaching each other to do them plenty well for thousands of millenia.

I suspect you're idealising a past that never existed. I don't think there is any particular evidence that people were ever in good physical health or easily in touch with their bodies. The evidence I have seen is they were malnourished, parasite- and disease-ridden and often lived relatively short lives filled with pain and discomfort. There are surely some lifestyle diseases that came into existence since the 1000s but there are also a lot more that disappeared.

I think this stuff is just generally tricky to get right and people struggled then about as much as people do now. For some easy things like diet there is no real question that they had it much worse.

First, I think you're haveing a knee-jerk reaction to my suggestion that the basics of healthy, normal human behavior comes "easy" and responding as though I suggested that life was some blissful utopia we should all return to or something. Those are just two entirely different claims, and I only made one of them.

Second, as far as your actual claim, not only do written and material records really not back some harsh dystopia in an abstract sense, but lived experience and direct observation from modern history directly dispute it. While colonialism did a number on many specific communities and seats of power, most communities around the globe were still not living all that much differently as they had been in the many centuries beforehand until as recently as the 20th century. Anthropology thrived as a field of study specifically because there were countless such communities still existed mostly undisturbed. And these communities faced challenges, just as ours does, but they weren't desperate, afflicted, and stricken except in acute and ephemeral pockets of disease outbreak, resource exhaustion, natural disaster, etc -- all of which we still face now ourselves.

Third, intuition alone should make you second guess your unevidenced sense of an dystopian elsewhere and elsewhen as it presupposes that humans -- despite spreading all over the world, reshaping it for millenia, and developing all sorts of sophisticated culture along the way -- were somehow the most awkward and incapable of lifeforms to ever live on that world, existing in sime constant misery and affliction profoundly worse than any wild animal. That doesn't really add up, right?

At the end of the day, the comfort and security of human life has never been perfectly optimal and utopian anywhere for all that long, including now, but the ease of just bheaving as a well human (which is what this discussion is about) comes quite naturally and shouldn't feel "hard" or at all once you've actually received the cultural inheritence in how to live it.

This easy-feeling cultural inheritence has very recently been disrupted in some high-visibility modern communities, which is a little tragic, but the insights are still available to those that missed them, as the person I responded to attested for themselves. So my question was simply whether or why they still felt these things were hard when so many others don't and never did. No idealization involved.

Maybe we're just weird imperfectly evolved creatures, and that there is no "ideal" way to do some of these activities? I mean, we make do as best we can, and in some respects we've been successful as a species, but I think that's been in large part due to our adaptability. And the thing about being very adaptable is that you're never perfectly suited for any one thing.

There is a wealth of science on stretching.

https://www.bradapp.com/docs/rec/stretching/ is (I think) an evolution of the "old" rec.stretching FAQ which was pretty good way back.

https://www.amazon.ca/Stretching-Scientifically-Guide-Flexib...

These are relatively old resources but worth reading and then updating.

At the risk of being harsh to the author, everything he knew about stretching was wrong ;)

If it is the case, perhaps do the community a favour?

I donno if you're suggesting I write a blog about stretching? ;)

I think Andrew Huberman did a podcast about this topic and he's usually pretty thorough. This summary seems good to me: https://www.hubermanlab.com/newsletter/stretching-protocols-...

At your first link, it is said the same thing as the main discovery of the parent article, i.e. that it is required to hold a stretch "for a prolonged period of time", otherwise stretching is not effective.

So the author might have been able to find from the beginning how to do effective stretching by searching carefully the available literature, but the conclusions seem fine.

A useful information in the parent article is giving a numeric value for the "a prolonged period of time" from your link, i.e. as being "at least 2 minutes".

Yeah, that has been known for a while, I guess at least since the 1960's but given I've seen something similar in Yoga I'd guess way further back. The more important bit though is that there are actually much more effective methods, i.e. while (EDIT: "simple"/non-PNF) static stretching maybe has some place in your routine, depending on your goals, you generally shouldn't rely on them for improving your flexibility.

I practice Karate and it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the small amount of static stretching that's pretty common in many Karate warmup routines does almost nothing for your flexibility.

EDIT: It seems some people include PNF under the umbrella of "static stretches" vs. e.g. dynamic or ballistic. When I'm using the term I'm referring to "simple" static stretches. I think Tom Kurz calls those "static active" or something like that. EDIT2: or they're called isometric stretches in certain literature.

I'm an ultra runner and I haven't (personally) stretched in about ~5 seasons now.

I see a pilates/personal trainer once a week that basically does all of the items mentioned by the OP:

- hip alignment

- postural restoration

- stott pilates

- stretching

We target soas, hip flexors, glutes, hips, lower abs, etc.

Not a single injury since battling with piriformis syndromes and ITBS years ago. Life changing.

Now do this when you are late 40s .

I'm already in my 40s. What's your point?

Note, when gaining strength and muscle, you're not growing muscle fibers, since you're born with like 99% of your fibers. They're multinucleated cells and don't undergo mitosis.

> Smash it, don’t rub it. Rubbing your muscles mainly just increases bloodflow, which is nice, but isn’t going to break up the years of fascia and adhesions or release chronically stiff muscles. You need to smash them instead.

This is true! Years ago, as a runner, I got hit with an IT band problem. It came on quite suddenly. Lots of pain on the right side of the knee. This just wouldn't go away and put a damper on the running. Half a lame mile and I wold be out.

This zero improvement situation went on for a month. I got fed up and so I went all kung-fu on that area. I massaged it very hard and tried to wrap my fingers around the fascia and yank it really hard this way and that.

Next day, I ran for a mile. No problem! Couldn't believe it. I cut it short at that to be safe. Day after that, two miles. Then 4, 8, ... and back in the game. I never "heard from" that body part ever again.

Very good! Can second that. I run alot and sometimes get knotty leg muscles/tendons. I've found for quad knots, the best way is to jam your elbow into the knot and hold until the muscle releases. For harder to reach areas like IT band then I use a massage gun with the pointy tip but you need to be careful not to bruise the area.

Last time I heard that we were all doing stretching wrong was that we were doing static stretching and not dynamic stretches. Now it turned out we weren’t doing static stretching _enough_

Different types of stretching for different situations. Dynamic (controlled) movements are what you want to use for activities that require you to perform similar movements (e.g. martial arts).

Static stretching is generally not a great way to gain static flexibility. Yes, if you do a lot and hold your stretches for prolonged times you will gain static flexibility but there are much faster methods (e.g. PNF). An important point though is that you need a base of strength as well. I.e. if your muscles are weak you're either not going to gain flexibility or you will increase your chance of injury.

I think the "root" of lack of knowledge about stretching goes to high school phys ed classes. The sport science has been there for a long time, though it keeps getting refined, but things like doing quick static stretches as a "warm up" routine (does nothing and maybe increases chance of injury in the following activities) is just people that don't know the science passing on something they've learnt from people that don't know the science.

Thanks for this! I was going to say exactly this, but less comprehensively and probably less coherently.

> I think the "root" of lack of knowledge about stretching goes to high school phys ed classes.

And high school sports. I knew something was seriously wrong with all that when I saw a friend of mine rip his hamstring during practice one day. He was nuts about stretching, but never did a proper warm-up.

I can anecdotally say my body works the exact opposite: holding stretches is excruciatingly painful for me and I went from not being able to touch my knees to full downward dog in 12 months by doing very short (2-3s) but very strong stretches (like painful enough I would tear up).

So I think every body is different and there is unfortunately no magic trick.

But the author did one thing that applies to everyone: don’t give up; read up, keep trying new stuff.

I'm not an expert and there are different cases..

The method the author describes seems to help him with his limited mobility (relaxing is part of the job) - but AFAIK then he will find his muscles sluggish. For dynamic power like martial arts, running etc. (even cycling) he will need them springy and to use different methods. As well for joints collagen type 2, Neocell Move Matrix, Animal Flex..

> Persistent tightness is as much a strength issue as a flexibility one.

> Other muscles around it may be overdeveloped and are essentially pulling it out of balance all the time.

Important point.

Person stops doing thing for 2 years, when returning to thing again now finds it very difficult, a while after returning to thing (plus adding in a hobby of pulling on themselves as instructed by youtube) is ok again.

He mentions that 30-45min per day helped and then some resources. But does he outline a general routine?

> For the first time in my life I got really strong, bench pressing my bodyweight

I quit reading here. Absolute beginner starts exercising and immediately starts preaching as an expert.

A bodyweight bench press isn't "really strong", that's like a baseline for a healthy adult man. To not be able to do that is a sign of being overweight, frail, or both.

Damn I feel personally called out haha.

I'm a 6ft 170lb male and I can bench press maybe 120 lbs for one rep max? I've been neglecting my bench press.

Absolutely no one untrained is lifting their body-weight in a bench press. About 1.1x body-weight 1RM press is largely considered as an intermediate lifter.

Are you saying that the typical man who's 180cm 70kg and doesn't work out at all, but doesn't have any diseases or health problems, would be able to bench 70kg their first time?

I'm saying if an adult man can't bench press 70kg then they are unhealthily frail, yes.

"Doesn't work out at all" is a problem. That's unhealthy and decreases their quality of life and shortens their lifespan. Our concept of "normal" in Western countries today is so far removed from what humans evolved to do and is good for us.

The most basic physical activity (whether playing sports, doing manual labor or any exercise program) should be enough to do a bodyweight benchpress.

2x bodyweight is an accomplishment that requires dedicated weight lifting. 1x bodyweight is something that basically every man 100 years ago could have done.

2 YT channels I like:

The stayflexy guy and Adam Frater. The former even cites scientific studies.

Adam Frater titles it with 'mobility'. I love his 'Improve your Calisthenics in 5 Minutes' vid.

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