How good is stretching for you?

[Brian SD]

Flexibility really fits perfectly into the whole 23 hours vs. 1 hours thing. If you're spending 23 hours of the day sitting in front of a computer and one hour stretching, you're not going to notice a big difference in flexibility. To me, flexibility is very important, even though I'm not flexible at all (lazy, definitely). Anyway, for preventing injuries, warming up is much more important than stretching, at least from what I know.

 

[whodini]

Originally Posted by BankerBoi

I think it would be unusual to find serious athletes who do not go through
a warm up and stretch sequence.
The studies I found sampled different programs/atheletes for their trials, that isn't to say that they had a non-stretching regimen to begin with.

What I failed to mention before was another interesting point brought up by one of the studies. They also measured athletic performance (sprinting times, height jumped, etc.) and found that non-stretchers had better numbers. It wasn't dramatic, as we are talking about trained atheletes, but it was definitely there. I'm sure it could be partially attributed to being mental, but before being told their scores many of the non-stretchers noted a decrease in ability when they had stretched out during trials.