NYT story: ‘If stretching was a drug, it would be recalled’
Stretching before training and competition has been part of my routine for four decades. It’s almost a religion. But my faith has been tested by a series of studies and news articles in recent years, including this recent one in The New York Times. Gina Kolata, a W60 runner and one of the best health and fitness writers in the business, wrote the article and focused on an issue I’ve been wondering about: Yeah, stretching may hurt your performance, but don’t you need it to avert injury? Well, the experts she talked seem to lean toward the idea stretching doesn’t prevent injuries either.
But even though definitive studies haven’t been done (since maybe it’s the warmup that’s needed but not the stretching component of it), one wrinkle remains off the radar:
Should masters athletes pay any attention to what experts say about elite young athletes and their warmup/stretching routines?
Here’s my strong belief: The older you get, the more essential stretching becomes.
Kolata quotes a Dr. Charles Kenny (no relation to me):
Stretching the hamstring muscle, for example, teaches the muscle to relax when the knee is fully extended, Dr. Kenny said. But that is not what a runner needs. Instead, runners need to have their hamstrings stiff and activated when the knees are extended. Of course, one test of how passionate researchers are about stretching is to ask them whether they themselves stretch. Many say they do.
Activated shmactivated, I say. Stretching before racing simply prepares body parts for activity. It seems counter-intuitive to think the day’s first test of a joint is when you’re jumping, throwing or sprinting in competition.
USATF is conducting a study on the merits of stretching, and I hope enough older age-groupers are involved to answer my question about whether masters have special stretching needs.
I once had the honor of warming up with world record holding hurdler Courtland Gray (back in 1997 at San Jose nationals). And as we did 50-meter build-up sprints on the backstretch, he reminded me: You gotta burn the muscles before they’re ready to race.
I think stretching obeys the same principle. Burn ’em first!
Here’s the text of Gina’s article, in case the link goes behind a locked door:
To Stretch or Not to Stretch? The Answer Is Elastic
By GINA KOLATA
NEWS about stretching seems to come in waves. Stretch as part of your warm-up. No, stretch after your workout. No, don’t even bother stretching. Or the doozy: Even if you think you like it, it’s been oversold as a way to prevent injury or improve performance.
The truth is that after dozens of studies and years of debate, no one really knows whether stretching helps, harms, or does anything in particular for performance or injury rates. Yet most athletes remain convinced that stretching helps, and recently more and more have felt a sort of social pressure to show that they are limber, in part due to the popularity of yoga. Flexibility has become another area where many athletes want to excel.
They’re like one of my running partners, Claire Brown, a 35-year-old triathlete.
“I always feel like, well, athletes should do yoga,” Claire said. “It’s supposed to be really good for running, and when I do it regularly, it does loosen up my hips and make me feel better for running.”
Yet she puts off going to yoga.
“It shouldn’t feel like an obligation, but it always does,” Claire said. “The good classes are often an hour and a half long, and I’m thinking: ‘I could be running, I could be biking. But here I am, stretching and breathing.’
“Isn’t it funny, though, that something that should be calming can actually cause stress because you think you have to do it?”
For the bottom line on stretching, there is an official government review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in the March 2004 issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Its conclusion, that the research to date is inadequate to answer most stretching questions, still holds.
The best that Dr. Julie Gilchrist, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and one of the study’s authors, can offer is a few guidelines and observations about why studies have yet to answer the stretching questions.
If your goal is to prevent injury, Dr. Gilchrist said, stretching does not seem to be enough. Warming up, though, can help. If you start out by moving through a range of motions that you’ll use during activity, you are less likely to be injured.
In fact, Dr. Gilchrist said, in her review of published papers, every one of the handful of studies that concluded that stretching prevented injuries included warm-ups with the stretches.
That is one reason the studies so far have been inadequate. Researchers need to separate their variables, said Malachy McHugh, the director of research at the Lenox Hill Hospital Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma in Manhattan.
“What’s missing are studies of stretching alone and studies of no stretching and no warm-up,” Dr. McHugh said.
But it may not be so easy to do such studies, he admitted, because most athletes in strength and speed sports like soccer and football believe in stretching, no matter what scientists say. Suppose you wanted to do a proper study, with a control group that did not stretch. Good luck, he said.
“If you go to a team and say, ‘You guys are not going to stretch and you guys are going to stretch,’ they would say, ‘You can leave the room now,’ ” Dr. McHugh said.
Some athletes — gymnasts, hurdlers and swimmers among them — may need to stretch to gain the flexibility they need for their sport, Dr. McHugh said.
But distance runners do not benefit from being flexible, he found. The most efficient runners, those who exerted the least effort to maintain a pace, were the stiffest.
That study involved 100 people who were tested with 11 flexibility tests. Then they walked and ran while the researchers measured their efficiency. Those who were the most flexible expended 10 to 12 percent more energy to move at the same speed as compared with the least flexible. But that study did not involve stretching — it could be that the most flexible people would have been flexible with or without stretching. And even when studies do ask whether performance changes after a stretching program, they usually involve artificial laboratory situations, said Christopher Morse, an exercise physiologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in England who has published papers on stretching and reviewed the stretching literature.
“The problem is that what is actually studied in the lab has very little intrinsic links to what is happening” when people actually exercise, he said.
Stretching can make you more flexible, but does it change a naturally efficient runner into an inefficient one?
No one knows, Dr. Morse added, but there also is no evidence that it does.
And while holding a stretch temporarily reduces muscle power when measured in the lab, Dr. Morse said, many people also warm up in real life, counteracting stretching’s negative effect and enabling muscles to work with full force.
That means, Dr. Morse said, that those studies showing stretching makes muscles temporarily weaker “might have no real-world consequences.”
THE few studies in real-world situations typically used military recruits. Some concluded that stretching was useless. Others that it prevented injuries. The stretching, though, was part of a training regimen, muddying attempts to decide whether the recruits had fewer injuries because they were better conditioned or because they stretched.
While the stretching debate goes on, some researchers who used to believe in stretching say they have become disillusioned.
Stacy J. Ingraham, an exercise physiologist at the University of Minnesota and a long distance runner, suffered from hamstring injuries when she was on a team. She stretched and stretched, for months on end, to no avail.
That made her wonder about stretching’s benefits, as did her subsequent years of coaching female high-school and college cross-country runners. Her runners stretched but, Dr. Ingraham said, stretching “did not seem to do what we’d been schooled about all our lives — it did not prevent injuries.”
She reviewed published papers, saw none that convinced her that stretching either protected people from injuries or improved performance, and became an antistretching evangelist.
“Runners don’t need to stretch,” she insists.
Dr. Charles Kenny, an orthopedist in private practice in Stockbridge, Mass., is even more adamantly opposed to stretching. The practice, he said, weakens performance and makes an injury more likely.
“If stretching was a drug, it would be recalled,” Dr. Kenny said.
Stretching the hamstring muscle, for example, teaches the muscle to relax when the knee is fully extended, Dr. Kenny said. But that is not what a runner needs. Instead, runners need to have their hamstrings stiff and activated when the knees are extended. Of course, one test of how passionate researchers are about stretching is to ask them whether they themselves stretch. Many say they do.
Dr. McHugh, who plays Gaelic football, which is similar to soccer, said he needs some flexibility to play, so he stretches.
Dr. Morse, a wrestler, also has a routine: “I get leg-muscle pulls, so I do low-level contractions, isometrics and dynamic stretches to warm up. And I stretch afterward.”
Dr. Gilchrist, who, at 40, runs, swims and lifts weights, has not been stretching, but is wavering.
“I am so inflexible I think it’s hazardous,” she said. “I am seriously considering stretching,” Dr. Gilchrist said.
But she is not thinking of yoga.
Dr. McHugh, for one, suggested that yoga may actually be more than most athletes need.
“I just saw a guy with arthritis in his knee,” Dr. McHugh said. “He was very flexible. He got into the lotus position, sitting on the floor with his knees hyperflexed in a figure-four. I told him this may not have brought on his arthritis but it is bringing on symptoms.”
Claire will be glad to know.
8 Responses
The statement by Dr. Kenney, that “Stretching the hamstring muscle, for example, teaches the muscle to relax when the knee is fully extended” seems to lack context. If you spend 10 minutes stretching and 1 hour running per day I think your muscles will ‘learn’ more from the 1 hour. Personally if I do a two mile warm up where I stop for easy stretches after the first mile (just to the edge of my range of motion for each stretch) I find an instant improvement in how I feel when I start the second mile.
I never stretched much in high school and never seems worse for wear. Once I began college track, of course, they taught us “real” stretching and I managed to get pretty limber. However, I always noticed that my muscled felt much weaker after the fact and I felt like this affected my practices and performances. I never questioned it though, because I was doing what I was taught. I tend to think that dynamic stretching using activity simulating drills is much better for maintaining power and warming up the muscles.
Stopped stretching before workouts back in my 20’s. Had noticed that the stretching without being warmed up actually led to injury. BUT I also started stretching AFTER workouts, which led to immediate and obvious improvement in recovery for the next day’s workout (credit the New Zealanders for figuring this out before the rest of us). I now also add exercises that reincorporate under-used muscle fibers and which simultaneously take other muscles out of perpetual spasm (in reaction to muscle imbalances created by the former).
Bottom line: I don’t use stretching (or other exercises) to get more limber. I use it to aid the recovery process. And without it I wouldn’t make it through a single month.
I believe that there is no universal answer to the benefits or non benefits of stretching. Some individuals are naturally much more flexible than others. Those individuals do not stand much to gain from intense stretching; whereas, others such as myself benefit greatly from daily stretching. I have very tight hamstrings. I have experienced inner hamstring injuries since my track career began. For the past few years I have learned that stretching has allowed me to gradually increase my stride length and help reduce my injuries. As for making your muscles weak. Yes, stretching does temporarily make your muscles weak. So does lifting, sprinting, plyometrics and yoga. I have also learned that the things you do that make you temporarily weak, actually is what makes you stronger.
“I have also learned that the things you do that make you temporarily weak, actually is what makes you stronger.”–Oscar Peyton. That’s great for long term strength, but terrible before a sprint or middle distance competition!
Stretching is overrated. Some stretching after an initial warm up is OK,but stretching for hours makes your soul feel good, but does not do much for you performance. It might actually hurt it. As a high jumper I used to stretch for hours, now I believe that interspersed stretching is a way to go. Do not stretch much more than you need for the given event.
The key is the fact that muscle tissue is about 4 – 5 degrees cooler than the body temp. Until you get the temp. of the muscle tissue raised, you do run the risk of injury. So you need to do some aerobic activity prior to stretching to assure the temp. increase. This means for most it is better to stretch at the completion of the workout.
I’m the guy who said “Stretching the hamstring muscle, for example, teaches the muscle to relax when the knee is fully extended”. I only said that after thirty years experience taking care of injured athletes and dancers, spending hundreds of hours researching a book, “Natural Flexibility”, and reading just about every stretching scientific study every done. It’s easy to think abot something for a few minutes and throw out an opinion. But let’s look at the facts. I see I’ve entered this fray late, and maybe noone’s around anymore. If anyone is still interested in this subject, I’ll meet you idea by idea. We’ll all just agree to have an open mind.The real goal is to perform the best and not get hurt, not to win a p~ contest.
For starters, the guy who said “Activated shmactivated, I say. Stretching before racing simply prepares body parts for activity.” Where’s the scientific basis for that? Let’s have some specific references or facts that we can all judge. I do not advocate, as was misrepresented above, just jumping in there full steam ahead when you’re still cold. I recommend isometrics, then progressive resistance exercises for warmups. Stetching is an unnatural exercise that has no benefit except to numb your aching muscles. Isometrics make aching muscles feel better, but without repressing reflexes or decreasing power.
Chas Kenny MD
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