People who run regularly know how important is to stretch your leg muscles before running.

But is it really necessary or is it doing you more harm?

via ca.shine.yahoo.com You don’t need to look very far to find advice about stretching and exercise: the oft-cited wisdom is that they should go hand-in-hand, like peanut-butter and jelly or Bonnie and Clyde.

You’ve surely heard that a little stretch before and/or after a work-out helps muscles warm up, keeps injuries at bay, and stress and muscle tension away.Stretching also, apparently, maintains muscle strength.

On the aptly named RunningInjuryFree.org blog, the writer claims, “stretching will help strengthen your muscles, enabling you to run better and helping you avoid injury.

” The Globe and Mail, which has developed a love affair with running over the last year, has dedicated many column inches and even videos to stretching advice for active readers.

Yet, other mainstream news outlets have made much of studies that show stretching before running has no impact on injury. “Stretching before your run?” the Toronto Star asked smugly. “You’re wasting your time.”The science shows you may want to think twice about dedicating time to the stretch.

In a recent update of a systematic review about stretching to reduce muscle soreness, the investigators examined randomized or quasi-randomized studies of pre-exercise or post-exercise stretching techniques designed to prevent or treat muscle soreness and found that “muscle stretching, whether conducted before, after, or before and after exercise, does not produce clinically important reductions in delayed-onset muscle soreness in healthy adults.”

In other words, stretching probably- not definitely-reduces soreness, but the effect is so small as to be barely noticeable. (This conclusion was the same as an earlier systematic review on the same subject.)

Another July 2011 Cochrane systematic review-”Interventions for preventing lower limb soft-tissue running injuries”-looked at the benefits of stretching for runners.

It synthesized 25 trials, which included more than 30,000 participants from military recruits, to runners from the general population, to soccer referees and even prisoners. It stated, “Overall, the evidence base for the effectiveness of interventions to reduce soft-tissue injury after intensive running is very weak, with few trials at low risk of bias.” One of the authors of the study, Dr. Ella Yeung (PhD) of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told Science-ish, “There is no evidence to suggest that stretching has a protective effect toward running-related injuries.” Read more 

 

Lets ask somebody who runs a lot.

What are you saying darlings?

Does stretching before running matter?

Or not?

Nah, I didn’t think so.

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