When should you stretch? How? Why? These questions are being asked more and more often, as several recent studies have shown that static stretching before exercise doesn’t improve performance or decrease the rate of injury.
Why? Let’s look at what static stretching really does. If your muscle is in its normal state, when you stretch it you elongate it. But a muscle’s strength is based on its ability to contract. Hold that static stretch for too long and you turn off the stretch reflex, the tendency of a muscle to return to its normal resting length. An elongated muscle with the same contractile ability is now a weaker muscle. What is worse is that you have now increased instability, the result of a larger range of motion and less strength to control it. One way to get around this is the popular Active Isolated Stretching. Another is Resistance Flexibility and Strength Training (RFST®) which strengthens your muscles while you stretch and has built-in safeguards to prevent overstretching.
RFST, from the Meridian Flexibility Center, uses resistance in the stretched muscle to generate eccentric contractions that build strength through the entire range of motion as you stretch. Muscles are set up in pairs. Their job is to move levers—your arms and legs, for example. When you do a bicep curl, your bicep contracts and your tricep relaxes and lengthens. When you straighten your arm your bicep relaxes, but that alone isn’t enough to get your arm straight. You need your tricep to contract. By the way, your bicep isn’t relaxing so much as contracting less strongly, so as to maintain control and stability. There is still tension in your bicep, even while it is lengthening. This is called an "eccentric" contraction. When your muscle is shortening under tension, it is called a "concentric" contraction.
In RFST, you contract the target muscle and use another muscle group to force the first muscle to elongate. For best results, you should also stretch the muscle’s antagonist or balancing muscle as well.
Interestingly, sometimes you can’t stretch a muscle because its balancing muscle is too weak to contract enough to make the first muscle elongate. If this is the case, you will feel pain or strain in the balancing muscle, not the muscle being stretched. The solution is to strengthen the balancing muscle by reversing the stretch you would use to stretch the balancing muscle. If you have a trouble with the hamstring stretch, for example, you would reverse the quad stretch.
For more, see www.meridianstretching.com or The Genius of Flexibility, by Bob Cooley.
Peter Guare, founder of Human HyperFormance, is a human performance consultant.