Runners! Stretching doesn’t really help!
Runners! Stretching doesn’t really help!:
I’ve been saying this for a long time now. I’ve read about stretching actually not providing any benefit before and it seems in line with my personal experiences as well. I don’t stretch before running except for very rare occasions and my legs are just fine. I do a few minutes of walking before I start and after I’m finished running, but that’s about it.
I do stretch before I play soccer though and 90% of the time when my legs are sore after physical activity, it’s from soccer. To be fair, soccer is a lot different. There’s a lot of full speed sprinting and variable speed running with standing and walking mixed in the middle all over the place. But the fact still is, the activity I stretch before tends to be the one producing any soreness I may have. I don’t know why I stretch before it when I don’t for anything else though. Maybe it’s time to stop.
I’m not entirely convinced about that one. Stretching seems to do me a lot of good (especially after a run), but I find it most effective when I’m doing something that actually stretches my muscles for longer, like Pilates.
So maybe you’re just in good enough shape not to need it!
Though it might just be a case of individual bodies. I know my legs need the stretching because my knees are bad, and because I’m also terribly unfit.
My knees are a horrible mess, but I’m lucky in that they respond to running very well. They don’t bother me much when I run unless I do more than I can handle. Once my leg muscles start to fatigue, my strides become weaker with less push and support in each step. That’s when I have problems. When I ran the half marathon, I was a mess because I was running with that fatigue for four miles.
The thing that’s awful for my knees is standing still for more than a few minutes at a time. I can’t do that at all without tons of pain. I think it’s the locking of my knees and direct weight on them.
Yep, I’m with you on the standing-still thing. It’s a pain in the ass when I go to see bands, because I’m too old to do much dancing…
I also lock my knees too far back, because my joints are a bit over-flexible (sadly a genetic thing), which puts heaps of stress on them. Still, I’m going to make an attempt to go running more… I figure that it hasn’t killed me yet!
[...] the shoes I’m retiring because I never believed in expensive running shoes–just like stretching, there are many studies that support this [...]