To stretch or not to stretch?
GINA KOLATA, NYT
Many researchers believe that stretching doesn't help athletes prevent injuries. GINA KOLATA has the story.
NEWS about stretching seems to come in waves. Stretch as part of your warm-up. No, stretch after your workout. No, don't even bother stretching. Or the doozy: Even if you think you like it, it's been oversold as a way to prevent injury or improve performance.
The truth is that after dozens of studies and years of debate, no one really knows whether stretching helps, harms, or does anything in particular as far as performance or injury are concerned.
Yet most athletes remain convinced that stretching helps, and recently more have felt a sort of social pressure to show that they are limber, in part due to the popularity of yoga. Flexibility has become another area where many athletes want to excel.
For the bottom line on stretching, there is an official government review by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, published in a recent issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise .
Its conclusion, that the research to date is inadequate to answer most stretching questions, still holds.
The best that Dr Julie Gilchrist, a medical epidemiologist, one of the study's authors, can offer is a few guidelines and observations about why studies have yet to answer the stretching questions.
If your goal is to prevent injury, Dr Gilchrist said, stretching does not seem to be enough. Warming up, though, can help.
If you start out by moving through a range of motions that you'll use during activity, you are less likely to be injured.
In fact, Dr Gilchrist said, in her review of published papers, every one of the handful of studies that concluded that stretching prevented injuries included warm-ups with the stretches.
But these studies so far have been inadequate.
Researchers need to separate their variables, said Malachy McHugh, the director of research at the Lenox Hill Hospital Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma in Manhattan.
"What's missing are studies of stretching alone and studies of no stretching and no warm-up," Dr McHugh said.
But it may not be so easy to do such studies, he admitted, because most athletes in strength and speed sports like soccer and football believe in stretching, no matter what scientists say.
Suppose you wanted to do a proper study, with a control group that did not stretch. Good luck, he said.
Some athletes - gymnasts, hurdlers and swimmers among them - may need to stretch to gain the flexibility they need for their sport, Dr McHugh said.
But distance runners do not benefit from being flexible, he found. The most efficient runners, those who exerted the least effort to maintain a pace, were the stiffest.
Stretching can make you more flexible, but does it change a naturally efficient runner into an inefficient one? No one knows, said another researcher, but there also is no evidence that it does.
And while holding a stretch temporarily reduces muscle power when measured in the lab, many people also warm up in real life, counteracting stretching's negative effect and enabling muscles to work with full force.
That means those studies showing stretching makes muscles temporarily weaker "might have no real-world consequences", said the researcher.
Stacy J. Ingraham, an exercise physiologist at the University of Minnesota and a long distance runner, suffered from hamstring injuries when she was on a team. She stretched and stretched, for months on end, to no avail.
That made her wonder about stretching's benefits, as did her subsequent years of coaching female high-school and college cross-country runners.
Her runners stretched but, Dr Ingraham said, stretching "did not seem to do what we'd been schooled about all our lives - it did not prevent injuries."
She reviewed published papers, saw none that convinced her that stretching either protected people from injuries or improved performance, and became an anti-stretching evangelist.
"Runners don't need to stretch," she insists.
Dr Charles Kenny, an orthopedist in private practice in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is even more adamantly opposed to stretching.
The practice, he said, weakens performance and makes an injury more likely.
Stretching the hamstring muscle, for example, teaches the muscle to relax when the knee is fully extended, Dr Kenny said.
But that is not what a runner needs.
Instead, runners need to have their hamstrings stiff and activated when the knees are extended.
Of course, one test of how passionate researchers are about stretching is to ask them whether they themselves stretch. Many say they do.
- NYT
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