Static stretching – who has time – and does it help performance or prevent injuries?
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In a real life situation where you have to sprint for your life you don’t have the opportunity to sit around a doing your stretching routine, well now research indicates that all that static stretching that so many people perform does not help you run faster, and in fact decreases performance. When compared to when the same runners did not stretch a standard static stretching routine ended up decreasing running efficiency by 5% (as measured by calories burned) when running at 65% of their VO2 max for 30 minutes. Next the subjects ran as far as they could in 30 minutes and in the non-stretching situation the runners ran 3.4% further.
But here at Fight or Flight fitness we are not just concerned about endurance type performance but also more anaerobic sprinting ability. Research finds the same thing, in which static stretching decreases performance, in this case sprinting speed. There are a number of studies that have found similar results.
Now you might argue that at least you should do the stretching to prevent injury but quite a few studies now show that stretching actually doesn’t help prevent injuries. Here is a paper that examined many stretching studies in a meta-analysis to add to this evidence of no positive effects on preventing injuries, but another more recent paper found “preliminary evidence, however, that static stretching may reduce musculotendinous injuries.” Still not a ringing endorsement and other studies did not find a positive effect on injury reduction.
In contrast there appears to be evidence that dynamic stretching does help performance. This dynamic stretching also seems to have more than an acute affect on performance.
However, in many more real world situations you won’t have the time to any type of stretching so it might be a good idea to ‘train’ your body for those situations. For more on this see my recent post on a new way to train for real life fitness.
