Post Workout Stretching: How Important Is It?
If you are anything at all like the average person, you may spend some time stretching, either before or just after exercise.
For most, post workout stretching is practically essential. Over the years, stretching out has been endorsed as a way to reduce your risk of injury, improve exercise performance, and alleviate muscle soreness after training.
Stretching is used by so many people in the belief that it reduces the risk of strains and sprains, it’s rare to hear anybody question its benefit. Yet, irrespective of virtually worldwide acceptance, there exists almost no evidence to show that stretching before exercise has any influence on injury risk.
The idea that stretching gets rid of lactic acid in muscles highlights a couple of the largest health and fitness myths going. Specifically, that it’s a "waste product" that creates muscle fatigue, and that it causes the soreness you experience within your muscles the day or 2 following a challenging training session.
The majority of people, even if they have set foot in a health club, have heard about lactic acid. Chances are you’ve been told that it builds up in your muscles whenever you exercise, causes that unpleasant "burning" sensation, and eventually makes your muscles give up.
The fact is, far from being a waste product, lactic acid is really a source of energy for your muscles. In fact, one of the reasons that intense training makes it possible to exercise harder and longer is that it makes your muscles better at making use of lactic acid.The concept lactic acid is bad is among the classic blunders in the history of science.
How about the concept that lactic acid brings about muscle soreness?
Lactic acid has absolutely nothing to do with DOMS. The truth is, the majority of the lactic acid has disappeared from your muscles soon after exercise, irrespective of whether you decide to do any stretching.
So why do your muscles get sore a day or two after training?
A session of unaccustomed or unusually intense exercise leads to inflammation – precisely the same biological defense mechanism that triggers the redness, swelling and pain if you cut your hand.
Inflammation is the human body’s response to damage and helps to start the process of restoration and healing. And one of the steps in this process is an surge in the production of immune cells, which hit a peak between one and two days after activity.
These cells then generate chemical compounds that make pain receptors inside your body – which are to blame for the transmission of dull, aching pain signals – more sensitive.
The result?
As soon as you move, these pain receptors are activated. Since they are far more sensitive to pain than normal, you end up feeling sore.
On a relevant note, I ought to also mention that post-exercise stretching doesn’t appear to have much of an effect in so far as muscle soreness is involved.
When a number of New Zealand scientists evaluated a variety of muscle soreness experiments, they found that stretching after training brought about an average reduction in post-exercise pain of just two percent – an effect that’s likely to end up of "no practical significance" for most people.
Obviously, this does not suggest that you should not perform any post workout stretching. However, if you’re only doing it because you’ve been told that stretching gets rid of lactic acid in muscles, or that it’s likely to decrease muscle soreness, there is very little proof to demonstrate that it makes any kind of real difference.
Filed under: General Interest