Stretch

We all need to stretch. It is extremely vital to incorporate a stretching routine into whatever your program currently consists of. Stretching is one of the things that no matter what your goals are, you need to add it in to what ever your routine is. Aside from performance enhancement factors, health and wellness is apart of almost everyone’s exercising regimen. To create or maintain a healthy body we need to stretch.

Injury prevention

The more elasticity you create in your muscles the less chance of injury during life and during exercise there will be. The muscles will become more flexible to therefore be able to withstand more potential punishment or “trauma” that might occur during playing your favorite sport, exercise, or some unfortunate miss-hap/movement from our lifestyle. Whether we are sitting in an office in front of a computer or moving furniture, stretching will realign the muscles fibers to there original proper postural outline in order to prevent muscle compensation (when one muscle does the work for another tight or weak muscle). Being the office worker you are in a fixated seated position for a long period of time, this will shorten your muscles and eventually cause them to tighten excessively resulting in aches, pain, and injuries. Being the furniture mover, just like in exercise, your muscles are exerting forcefully to lift, pull or push a device. This results in our muscles becoming unaligned do to the strenuous exertion. When we stretch we realign our muscles, so the same focus of stretching after a workout is required to once again, realign, relax, and help recover the muscles that were strained.

Increase blood and oxygen flow

To simplify this point, when we stretch our muscles are lengthening. The fibers that were once tight or out of proper alignment can now be properly aligned. This will result in proper and increased blood and oxygen flow to the area being stretched. Our brains send signals that a stretch is occurring therefore our body will respond by sending blood and oxygen to allow this stretch to be efficient. Just like during certain exercises we do, our body responds with blood and oxygen increase, the same goes for when we stretch.
This will not only help us to create a healthy and responsive body, but will also help our overall performance in exercise as well as in life. From stronger and healthier muscles with increased range of motion, to more relaxed and oxygenated fibers.

When and For How Long

It is always best to stretch a warm muscle. This means a muscle that is warmed up with blood, although stretching increases blood flow to the area needed, it takes time, and for someone to jump into a stretch without the muscles being warm, this could actually result in a negative outcome, like tightened or strained muscle.
That is why if you chose to stretch before a workout, then you must warm up your entire body for about five minutes. A warm-up can consist of anything that is consistently elevating your heart rate slightly, a warm up does not have to be to intense.
That is why you see a lot of people stretching after the workout, the muscles by now are very warm and it is a great time to cool off and stretch.
Another way and great time to stretch is after the shower. The shower actually warms up the body as well therefore allowing blood to flow throughout the body. If a shower before bed is in your lifestyle routine then this is a bonus, referring back to our previous paragraph about oxygen flow. The body will be more relaxed due to the increase of oxygen and stretching occurring, resulting in better sleeps.
We need to hold our stretching position for at least 30 seconds. A stretch will not be effective if it is held for any less of time. Our body has nerves that protect our muscles from hyperflexion, hyperextension, basically to make sure we don’t hurt ourselves by over flexing or stretching without knowing it. These nerves get signals from the brain, after about 30 seconds, that a stretch is occurring. This will allow these nerves to temporarily “shut off” during the stretch, to allow the muscle to relax and fully elongate. Any less than 30 seconds your muscles will actually protect themselves and tighten up.

Although there may be some technicalities to properly stretching, the main thing to remember is to slowly and effectively add stretching to your lifestyle.

Now Go Stretch!