How Important is stretching to your health? And how much should time should you invest in it?
There’s been a lot of talk around stretching lately. People like me have been clamoring for many years that stretching is very overrated and takes up way too large of a role in most people’s exercise programs. There is a lot of evidence that tell us it falls flat with regards to range of motion gains (compared to loaded mobility), injury prevention (no correlation), or utility for sports or performance. You’re far better off doing some loaded mobility or dynamic movement than spending a ton of time stretching every muscle you have. Loading up your end ranges of motion serves multiple purposes: the stretch receptors that help determine a muscles “length” are more likely to adapt if there is extra stress on the muscle, load will also allow you to adapt elements of control over your body, and it will also allow your tissues to become stronger and more resilient in what is typically it’s most vulnerable position.
I myself still believe stretching has a place. It is not useless. There are others that will tell you that it’s a complete waste of time. For me, movement is movement. If people will do 10 minutes of stretching at home on an off day, a recovery day, or when they can’t make it to the gym due to time or life constraints, then that is still really great. It’s still a positive stress for the body that helps you to move and improve, even if the effects are marginal. Stretching can also still give you that really positive dopamine boost and post-exercise relaxation that makes us feel good. There’s never anything wrong with feeling good and doing something that involves moving your body.
But in the big picture, it should really only make up a very small percentage of a person’s regiment. There are far greater benefits to strength, conditioning, loaded mobility, and skill acquisition for your long term health. They will have the most profound impact on your ability to reduce/prevent injury, stave off disease and maintain a healthy immune system, look more aesthetic and ultimately feel better.
With regards to timing, it doesn’t matter whether you stretch before exercise, after exercise, or dedicate your own day to stretching. It doesn’t help performance or reduce injury risk before an exercise or sport and it doesn’t improve recovery after an exercise or sport. All that matters to see some effect is that you do it often or intense enough to see change, just like any other type of training. Time under tension is all that matters. If you do it hard enough for long enough, you’ll see more results.
What does recovery even mean? What is the most effective way to recover? Should I do active recovery or passive recovery?
The word recovery gets used a lot with training these days. And it is really important with regards to optimal performance and injury reduction. Recovery is the ability for our body to return to a baseline level following a training stimulus. Typically it involves a period of time for our muscles, bones, nervous system etc to repair itself and build itself back to a “normal” state”. We see tons of “biohacks” discussing the ability to recover. Ice baths, sauna, foam rolling, active recovery, sleep, massage, stretching, cupping, acupuncture, red light…what actually helps?
Quite honestly, the best thing you can do is just sleep and rest. Our body is best at repairing itself after harder workouts by just leaving it alone. I forget who I heard the line from, perhaps Dr. Mike Israetel, but “it’s addition by subtraction.” It’s really difficult to think about adding more stress to your system that somehow helps it recover better.
There is marginal evidence that any of the above modalities improve recovery. It doesn’t make that useless. Things can definitely feel better but not be better. Many of these things are giving us a transient sensory experience that can sort of distract the nervous system for a time and allow it to perform a little better in the short term. Working with athletes or lifters who train consistently at higher levels can utilize these techniques to help them perform again and again and get a little bit better performance out of them because they “feel” better or looser or more freedom of movement. But the feel good stuff is a bit of an illusion because it isn’t ACTUALLY making you any better or more recovered. Again, this isn’t an attack on any of these strategies because they can be really effective at helping those elite athletes perform better in those short windows. But for most of us average, amateur level fitness enthusiasts, we aren’t training hard enough to require it. Getting a good sleep and sitting on our a** is probably the best thing we can do after a bout of intense exercise, and usually isn’t worth the thousands of dollars in investment for cold tanks, saunas, red lights, massage chairs…there’s just no evidence that they are actually effective in helping with recovery. If you have the means or you just like the way it makes you feel, please, by all means. It may make a small difference and allow you to perform just a little bit better. But on the whole, there is no magic pill that’s going to help you more than a good night’s sleep.
Imagine doing everything you’ve ever done right handed but expecting the left to have the same size or skill level. Unless you are ambidextrous, you’ve been brushing your teeth, writing, swinging a bat or a club, kicking a ball one way your entire life. Maybe an athlete who practices their skills on both sides daily will have a little bit less disparity between right and left side.
But most people living a perfectly normal life are just not practicing skills or tasks with both sides. When you multiply this by 20, 30, 40, 50 years…you are going to have some imbalances. There is no direct link between muscle imbalance and injury. Yes, weak links on BOTH sides can fail and may need to be addressed. But left or right being bigger or stronger is not directly causing pain or injury.
I’ve been working out for the better part of 20 years. My left arm is still the limiting factor for a heavy dumbbell press. My left leg pistol squat is weaker than my right. I have a little more development visible on my right chest, arm, upper back. It’s perfectly normal and healthy.
Unless you are bodybuilding, for which it does matter, just work hard and incorporate some single leg / single arm activities in your programming. You don’t need to spend countless hours working on every little flaw or else you wouldn’t get any meaningful progress.
We are all flawed. The human body consists of 200+ bones and 700+ muscles. Do you really think they are all perfect? If we addressed every little imperfection we’d be moving backwards in our training. FOCUS ON WHAT MATTERS MOST, then do some fine tuning when things aren’t working the way you’d like them to.
Pursuing more symmetry (unless bodybuilding or you have a specific injury/reason to be working a weak link) is wasted time and effort that could be moving you forward. A good program incorporates some single arm or leg stuff and that should be more than enough for most of us.
You don’t need a bunch of equipment or a heavy investment of time to keep moving you forward with your training. Obviously we’d like to spend some hours at the gym lifting weights, doing some effective zone 2 cardio, working on some mobility, maybe some HIIT work here and there. But for many of us, things come up. Work. Kids. You get invited to the bar. Things you simply can’t sacrifice for the gym.
Have a plan B in your back pocket. It won’t be nearly as effective as what you can accomplish in an hour, but I often find that it’s a choice between a full session, or no session at all. Find the middle ground sometimes! You can still be effective in 15, 10 or even five minutes. Strive for more, but keep some effective short workouts in your pocket for a rainy day. Things I like to focus on:
Pushups to failure (or close)
Sprints, any length, there and back
Jumps – squat jumps or box jumps
Lateral Agility – side to side
Stairs – 2 at a time
There are many variations which would be effective, but the next time you’re crunched for time, try these simple but effective exercises to avoid missing a day. You’ll be rewarded for setting a good precedent and never missing a scheduled workout day. Some is always better than none!
Patience is a virtue. It takes months of foundation building and years of training to achieve most people’s goals. Don’t be sold on quick fixes or the idea that you can change your life or physique in a few months. Build a quality foundation and layer on gradual intensity to achieve your dream.
All roads lead back here. Without a program that includes consistency as the foundational element, it will fail.
Work too hard (yes, I do mean this)
Keep the intensity reasonable.
You don’t have to be dripping sweat or feeling a crazy burn to be effective, and likely shouldn’t for the first month or two.
Too many people start too aggressive and end up burning out or too sore/tired to keep it up.
Too much frequency
Yes I know that it sounds crazy that doing too much is a problem, but burnout really is the biggest risk to achieving success.
You aren’t ready to workout every day – start with 2-3 days per week, increase to 3-5 after a few weeks or a month depending on how you feel.
Time management is one of the biggest obstacles to success, make it more achievable.
Too much volume
You don’t have to be in the gym for an hour to be effective.
Start simple and keep it to the most important exercises – keep your workouts under 30 minutes.
Once again, trying to do too much is one of the biggest mistakes.
Too much emphasis on abs
You cannot spot reduce fat, which means no amount of abdominal training is going to give you a beach body – you’ll just get stronger abs beneath the surface.
Spend time on compound exercises like squats, lunges, deadlifts, presses – you will gain far more value out of these than a ton of abdominal exercises.
Notice that the majority of this list involves doing “too much”. We have to take a step back if you are a beginner. Hard work is noble and necessary for results. But not in the beginning. We have to lay the groundwork for success and cannot emulate what a seasoned bodybuilder or powerlifter workout looks like if we’ve never done it before. Make your goals 6 months to a year out. You will not gain any meaningful results by trying to cram a lot of exercise or movement into a short amount of time. Good habits are the building blocks for long term success and reaching your goals.
We have been told in the past that kids shouldn’t be lifting heavy weights. We’ve had a rough guideline for young kids that they really shouldn’t be doing any sort of formal strength training before puberty / teenage years. We’ve often cited that the risk is too high for injury or that kids can damage their growth plates. I still hear this pretty consistently from parents of young athletes.
In truth, there is very little evidence to support the idea that strength training will harm growth. If that were true, we would have to tell kids to stop running and playing as well. I don’t know any young kids who can lift three times their bodyweight. Yet if we look here, going for a run puts up to 3x bodyweight forces into our joints. Jumping up to 7x our bodyweight. A normal, healthy sport like gymnastics can produce up to 11x bodyweight forces. The math doesn’t add up. A typical, controlled weight lifting session would probably put .5-2x bodyweight forces into a child’s joints and that is “dangerous”, but jumping and running and sport all “safe” despite having significantly higher stress. Do we see the contradiction here?
Activity
Bodyweight Forces (Lower Extremity)
Walking
1-1.5x
Running
2-3x
Jumping (Two Legs)
5-7x
Gymnastics
8-11x
Young kids are likely to be putting more stress on their joints from normal activities like sport and play than they are with weightlifting. Furthermore, more stress is not a bad thing. Stress is ultimately what builds us stronger and more capable. It’s the dosage that matters. The same way we wouldn’t introduce a track athlete to running with marathon distances, we would never introduce ridiculously heavy weights into a person’s programming until they’ve earned it over many many years. The same for adults.
Strength training offers so much value for the health of our bones, muscles, tendons, cartilage, nervous system; it helps with performance and injury prevention. It’s probably time to start rethinking the idea that strength training at a young age is dangerous, and instead look at the best ways to introduce appropriate training to the younger generation. Very young kids would probably benefit more from learning how to control their bodies in space, do more jump, sprint and agility training and build strength through more fun activities rather than barbells and dumbbells. But these are just tools to gain a mechanical advantage, and they shouldn’t be seen as these scary objects. If a child is both physically and emotionally mature enough to use tools that could help them improve, why wouldn’t we want to utilize them? Our problem is the perception that they are dangerous. The truth is that they are not appropriate for many adults just starting out either. But for the kids that are a little more advanced or mature, we are probably holding them back from reaching their potential. We should let the trainers help to determine who is ready and who is not.
