Stretching

Do you stretch?  Do you have a reason to?

Are you a hockey goalie trying to be more flexible? Or a ballerina that has to work wicked hard for the flexibility needed?

Now, stretching to help with tightness in the hamstrings or lower back or to improve range of motion aside, there has been some rumbling that it can help with prevention or reduction of muscle soreness.

Sweat Science posted and commented on a new review of stretching.

Before I mention anything else further I'm going to pull his summary of three reasons to stretch:

1. reduce the risk of injury;
2. enhance athletic performance;
3. reduce soreness after exercise.

So #1 is easy.  If you have more range of motion and you crash (on the bike) or something equally dramatic that may pull your body in a non pedaling range of extension, being flexible will allow you to avoid injury.  Also having static muscles that are flexible will help avoid skeletal misalignment when the body is stressed and under heavy load (mid race back getting wacked as everything tightens up).

There seems to be a pretty solid consensus that stretching is beneficial for reducing injury.  For most of the cyclists I know it means stretching the hamstrings and lower back.  And little else.  What benefit can you find from stretching the quads? Well maybe 2 and 3?

Jeff the Canadian Moote tweeted: "...have you ever met a cyclist who wasn't chronically tight? Our hamstrings are like bridge cables."  So I followed up with a question to Jeff and Todd (the other Rowell): but do you stretch your quads? or just your back and hamstrings? AKA not power muscles that get DOMS from workout. 

And this is where it got good (and ties in).  Jeff says he stretches everything (when he bothers to) but focuses specifically not on the power muscles.  Todd chimes back in that a long time ago from Verheul that stretching can lead to lower performance and so he just targets his problem groups (bridge cable hamstrings I'm guessing).

Science seems to agree with them.  A certain Starr Walker chimed in a bit after the real time discussion with Jeff and Todd suggesting that stretching is "pointless only because they can't accurately test it. Science needs to UPGRADE"

That is an interesting statement.  No?  Science needs to upgrade?  How? It hasn't even made it out of Beta testing yet!

It is the beauty of science, you don't think it is right? Test it and prove it.  Find the facts in a controlled manner and show that your opinion is validated.  Dynamic.  Stuff is changing.  Yes you have to make an effort to get funding, and to get funding you need to demonstrate you know what you are talking about and that someone will not be wasting their cash on your project, and yes it takes work.  Quite a bit of work to design and implement and test a question.  But, like getting faster on the bike, it takes work.  Lots of work.

Some good reading or not so good reading.  But it is SCIENCE.  Like replacing breakfast with black coffee (and avoiding alcohol).

From one of those:
"It is recommended that heavy static stretching exercises lasting for 10 minutes for a muscle group should be avoided prior to any performances requiring maximal strength endurance effort."
Makes sense I suppose. Although the test was only to see if stretching before was detrimental.  Not so much afterwards.

All about the question and the test design.  The biggest issue with sports medicine is human variability and how do you test for improvement or lack of improvement in a controlled manner.  Ideally you need clones who've developed in an identical manner (to minimize epigentic influences) and then maybe you can make an informed and accurate scientific comparison.  Increasing the population studied is the only replacement.  But then your results will be skewed by age groups, one 'test' might benefit people 20 year olds differently than 40 year old individuals.

Now flip that all around and you have this "study" about stretching.
here is the Abstract:

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigated the influence of static stretching exercises on specific exercise performances.

Methods: Thirty-eight volunteers participated in this study. The stretching group (STR) consisted of 8 males and 11 females whose activity was limited to a 10-wk, 40-min, 3-d·wk^-1static stretching routine designed to stretch all the major muscle groups in the lower extremity. The control group (CON) consisted of 8 males and 11 females who did not participate in any kind of regular exercise routine during the study. Each subject was measured before and after for flexibility, power (20-m sprint, standing long jump, vertical jump), strength (knee flexion and knee extension one-repetition maximum (1RM)), and strength endurance (number of repetitions at 60% of 1RM for both knee flexion and knee extension).

Results: STR had significant average improvements (P < 0.05) for flexibility (18.1%), standing long jump (2.3%), vertical jump (6.7%), 20-m sprint (1.3%), knee flexion 1RM (15.3%), knee extension 1RM (32.4%), knee flexion endurance (30.4%) and knee extension endurance (28.5%). The control group showed no improvement.

Conclusion: This study suggests that chronic static stretching exercises by themselves can improve specific exercise performances. It is possible that persons who are unable to participate in traditional strength training activities may be able to experience gains through stretching, which would allow them to transition into a more traditional exercise regimen.

So that study shows that if you only stretch and do nothing else you improve.  Really cool.  But wait.  If you sit around on your ass vs stretching, stretching is better?  Too bad they didn't have an exercise regime to test against instead of inactivity.  That study, while interesting, is pretty much useless for an athlete trying to choose 'to stretch or not to stretch.'

Read through this.  (citations you can follow up up if you want - directions are at the top to find them).  Cool info.  So.

Do I stretch? Yes.  I stretch my hamstrings and my lower back.  Rarely do I stretch my quads or my calves. And I do it almost daily, usually in the evening.

Does it help? I dunno.  So far I'm not broken.  But if you know anything about science, correlation does not imply causation.

Now lets turn to one of the more popular sports science blogs and look at what they say in here about stretching:
As far as the core muscles and trunk go, the less flexible you are, the more stable the pelvis is, and the less muscle work is required to limit the motion as you run - you're a more 'compact unit' so to speak. To sum it up then - less flexibility means less work required for stability and also more elastic energy return from stiffer muscles and joints. I therefore tend to believe the theory that being less flexible is better for running.

Having said that, it doesn't mean that flexbility is not important. I hope it's quite clear that it's all about BALANCE. In other words, right vs. left, front vs. back balance (in both strength and flexibility) is what determines stability and thus possibly economy. The take home message is therefore to avoid random, indiscriminate stretching, because for all you know, you're messing up your natural balance, increasing injury risk and becoming less economical. But also, don't avoid stretching altogether, because then you might go the other way and get too tight in one important area! Everything in moderation!
So yeah. As a cyclists.  Stretch the shit that is getting tighter than it should but don't mess with your power muscles.  Where the hell have I heard that before....

Hmmm

Oh well - enough reading scientific journals between tweaking microscopes.  Would be cool if I was helping the folks who are looking at fascicle length and diameter after uphill or down hill walked (trained/adapted) turkeys.  But not right now.

And on a totally unrelated topic, I'm crazy excited about the new Gatan 3View.

SCIENCE FTW!
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