Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

It is nothing new, it was suspected for a while by many studies.

Personally I do not practice stretching. It initially started as an experiment - as in "if I don't stretch I should get hurt ?", "ok I want to test this and see precisely how much!", ie to try to evaluate the marginal value of stretching.

So far I have yet to see a negative consequence of not stretching (ie increased risk of injury, even if anecdotal experience is not very helpful)

Preparing oneself to movement is something else - you do not just immediately do something point blank, at least personally I don't - I try to "get a feeling" of the movement by performing it once or twice without any load.

Neurologically, for a computing equivalent, this acts like caching - your cerebellum is a cache for your physical movement equations (ie activate this muscle at this time, then t microseconds later this other muscle, etc)

So just performing the movement like a mime preloads the equations into the cache - basically, it makes you more efficient!

What worries me however is the amount of people you meet (ex- PT) who insist on you stretching, and who may not take no as a response - as if the refusal to stretch was just an indicative of a lack of knowledge, and therefore the superiority of their position, and that by some "moral imperative" they had to impose you the truth.

I always find that weird.

Just as with everything in life, wisdom of the crowd may not be indicative of the best way to achieve a given result.

EDIT: for those talking about post effort stretching, there is less evidence about this. Some says it prevent too much acidity from accumulating in the muscle (lactic acid), yet this same parameter in studies on weight lifters has been show to increase muscle mass and volume. Yes it may cause pain and prevent you from performing similar activity the next day, but if your goal is to maximize the health benefits on the time spent, and not just maximize the distance run or the amount of time spent running, it might be a better idea to avoid stretching, "do with" the pain, and skip practicing until you have less pain ie skip up to a week.

Overtraining exists, and just compare marathon runners to sprinters. Who visually seems the "fittest"? I'd rather look like a sprinter than a marathon runner, and also the risk of injury seems higher in distance running.

What about stretching in between?

Like you, I abandoned pre-workout and post workout stretching without any ill effect.

I often stretch in between though, and have found it can be effective in relieving chronically tight muscles. For example, I had a 'permanently' tight hamstring that I fixed with 30 seconds of targeted stretching per day for about a month.

I use it for either imbalances, or for soreness from weight-lifting. However, I'm less certain of the usefulness of what I'm doing compared to my hamstring fix.

Those stretches were provided by a physiotherapist, and worked very well. My previous hamstring stretches had achieved nothing. The ones he gave me were generally dynamic stretches.

I can't comment on stretching but I've found foam rolling (or other such myofascial release) to be the greatest thing ever for relieving tight muscles. Have you tried that?

Yes. I think I need to learn a few different positions, as I can not hit some muscle groups as well as others.

I've also used a theracane to great effect on my shoulders.

To add to drexel, foam rollers or rumble rollers are great. I've also got an orbital buffer I use on myself that, as funny as it sounds, works amazingly well.

Excellent remark : like you, I keep some minimal in-between stretching (and I pay much more attention to drinking sweet cold water or soda during effort)

I do that ministretch when I "hear" or "feel" cracks that just should not occur in a given position or movement. It's as if my ankle was trying to sing the me the song if its people :-)

Lately I have noticed I could also do without this last remnant of stretching if the movements could be scheduled to alternate opposite muscle groups, ie make each routine put load on muscles which generally oppose (bi/tri ceps) and concentrate your training on a different set each day,

Exemples: investe in the biceps in your training today, it passively stretches the triceps, the do the triceps etc. so that at the end on your training everything is stretched even if you did not do stretching.

It's not "real" stretching - just the idea that curls should go hand-to-hand with skull-crushers.

I want to express how incredibly odd it is (and yet fitting for HN) that you're analogizing a fairly simple physical concept in terms of computing.

It's not called "warming up" because of the minor uptick in body heat.

Not a criticism; just remarking on the oddity because it amused me.

Many exercises are simply not safe if your muscles are tight or you lack the flexibility to do them properly. Swimming, weight lifting, most sports come immediately to mind.

I'd say that not stretching and not warming up are two different things.

I'd agree that there are certain movements that you really don't want to attempt without a certain amount of prerequisite flexibility, which often requires a certain amount of static stretching to achieve.

However, overall flexibility seems to be a longer term condition than just pre-workout stuff. Stretching post-workout or daily but disconnected from pre-strenuous exercise seems to make you more limber/capable of movements that require more flexibility to safely/correctly do. In particular, most of the serious dancers I know stretch(ed) a huge amount (often daily) and also did fairly strenuous dance (often daily), but the static stretching and actual exercise were highly removed from each other. There are also a lot of movements in most types of dance that are either impossible or dangerous without a certain amount of prerequisite flexibility.

Pre-workout warmups are also seem important for avoiding injury: if your muscles are tight/tense and you throw yourself into a strenuous exercise, my experience and everything I've heard says you're going to have a bad time. From personal experience, but every time I've injured/hurt my muscles it was during exercise where I hadn't warmed up or had done a bare minimum of warmup.

Source: Mainly personal experience and what I've seen as a former competitive swimmer (high school varsity, butterfly, fairly serious), former dancer (modern; not serious, but I know some people who were part of larger dance companies), and someone who is currently involved in fairly intense bodyweight strength training (think gymnastic conditioning).

I'm a competitive powerlifter. Your statement isn't quite true. The best way to acquire the flexibility for weightlifting movements is to perform those movements. If you aren't flexible enough to squat to the correct depth, the solution is to squat as deep as you can, and let that serve as the stretch.

The accepted wisdom amongst my crowd is that the appropriate warmup prep is some dynamic movement to raise the body temperature, like rowing or biking, followed by practicing a given movement at progressively higher weights, until you are ready for the work sets.

I've never heard a weightlifter recommend static stretching before training.

I do powerlifting, though not competitively, and I can't agree with you that the best way of acquiring the flexibility is to do the movements. I struggled for nearly a year to improve my depth on my squats and deadlifts that way.

It took <3 months to fix once I saw a physiotherapist that gave me some dynamic stretches to do in between my workouts. I increased my squats from a paltry 2/3 of my body weight and reduced range of motion to 1.5x my body weight at full range of motion in 6 months from I started doing the stretches, after having been stuck without any improvement for many months. I've kept increasing since.

I don't doubt that doing the movements may work for some, especially if you have reasonable flexibility to start with, but it certainly didn't work for me, or at least did not give noticeable results over a very long period of time, whereas it took less than 2 weeks from I started doing my stretches until I saw substantial improvements.

I absolutely agree with you that pre-exercise stretches is not recommended for lifting weights, but that does not mean stretches are not useful.

Can I ask specifically what kind of dynamic stretching you were doing? I have chronically tight hips that leave me unable to perform "adequate" squats - poor range of motion and balance on the squats, and lack of power. I'd love any tips you have to offer.

Not much, actually. Swinging a leg at a time back and forward, and left and right, as well putting a foot at a time forward and doing a pike stretch down to that foot and right back up again, walk a couple of steps and doing the other foot (like #2 here, but a foot forward at a time: http://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-More-Flexible-Back).

Strict good-mornings are also quite good once you have decent amounts of flexibility. Strict = make sure your back stays arched, push your butt as far back as possible, with a slight bend in your knees, and hinge/bend at the hips. Essentially you should feel it in your thighs and butt and not elsewhere; if you start losing the arch in your back, you've pushed as far down as you can go, go back up and repeat. It's more important to keep form than forcing yourself as deep as possible - you'll get better depth soon enough.

I've later incorporated some static stretches including several of the one in the wikihow link above, but the ones above were enough to see dramatic improvement when done a for a few minutes a couple of times a day.

I also do asian squats regularly (so effectively sitting down in a squat position, unloaded, for as long as I an do - a few years back I wouldn't be able to get up without intense pain from that position, if I got into it in the first place...) and feel that helps me increase the depth I get into (and it's made it so much easier to play with my young son, to be able to effortlessly squat down to him instead of ruining my knees...).

That's good to hear, thanks. I have always had very good flexibility, so it was never an issue for me. I do stretch my hamstrings and IT band sometimes, and static stretching certainly has it's uses.

Glad to hear dynamic stretches worked for you!

Yeah, static stretching makes you too loose for powerlifting. You need to be able to achieve extraordinary tightness to maintain proper posture under the bar.

I find that foam rolling, lacrosse ball rolling, and band tension exercises help the most before powerlifting. My knees don't seem to track properly for the squat unless I foam roll my legs and glutes beforehand. It makes a huge difference.

Light static stretching is good for relieving tension and tightness after the workout. But before, foam rolling is much much better for making you flexible without losing force and tightness.

I second this. While I'm not a powerlifter, I do lift regularly. Two years ago I stretched before doing anything, including a warm up. Sometimes I would be in a rush and skip the stretching. After I noticed that it made no noticeable difference, I dropped it and just did my regular warm up (run a mile). Now, before doing anything really heavy, I'll just do the movement with little weight or only body weight. I've been able to lift more and seem to have less muscle fatigue as a result.

You definitively want your muscles to be tight for weight lifting. But you also want the flexibility to do the full range of motion.

What you absolutely don't want is to stretch before the exercise to loosen up the muscle - you're not suddenly going to gain much extra range of motion, but you will reduce your ability to control the movement.

Stretching after (our outside of) your regular workouts, on the other hand, can be useful.

The article presents studies which contradict that exact claim.

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