Your stretching thread
Dec 07, 2009 by
libjpn
Slart discusses some stretches that I'll put below the fold. Stretching is something that particularly interests me because I am probably the most unflexible person on the planet. Some of the stretches that Slarti describes are ones that I do, but my lack of flexibility is so massive, it fails to put a dent in it.
For christmas, I have been thinking of investing in the Inflex method, though I note that the webpage hasn't been updated since 2000 or so.
So put your stretches in the comments!
Slarti writes:
My typical stretching...workout, I guess you would call it, is a hundred jumping jacks to get warmed up a bit, followed by ten or fifteen each straight front kick, roundhouse, swing kick to the side, and back kick with 5lb leg weights. Then I do some work bringing the leg into chamber position and slowly executing the kick, again with leg weights, to strengthen and re-warm the muscles. I do that for front snap and side kicks only. Then I do standing straddle stretches, taking care to stretch down to each ankle as well as the center. Then I do a stretch that looks a bit like a lunge: bent leg out in front, other leg stretched straight out back, knee not touching the ground. You're almost in a lunge position, only your back leg is straight. Then you bend down and try to put your elbow on the ground right beside your foot. If your right leg is in front, your right elbow goes next to your foot; right forearm on the ground perpendicular to your foot.
If you're not that flexible, you won't be able to put your elbow anywhere near the floor. The object, though, isn't to succeed in doing that. The object is to do the best you can, and slowly improve your effort over time.
Another good stretch is, you get down on your knees, then spread your knees out laterally as far as you can. Then lie down on your face, and then you can adjust your torso with your arms, back and forth, working the hip flexors as you scoot your torso backward. Most people can't make their hips go further back than their knees, but again: the objective is to loosen up those muscles.
Comments
Dec 09, 2009, 01:35:43 cleek wrote:
i do not stretch. i am taut and twangy. just how the FSM intended.
Dec 09, 2009, 06:17:33 Slartibartfast wrote:
If you're not doing a reasonably intense stretch at least 3-4 times a week, I think you can't have much hope of seeing progress. I too am non-stretchy, but I've been able to make progress when I approach it in a committed fashion.
How non-stretchy? For me, a straight-legged toe-touch was something that only happened if I bounced into it. Keeping my fingertips to toetips just could not happen. Straddle was something less than a 90 degree angle between the legs.
Now I can grasp the bottoms of my feet and hold that posture for quite a while. But I'm still not at a face-on-knees kind of flexibility. I can get straddle out to maybe 120 degrees; maybe a little more. But I have time, and patience, and hope that what my instructor tells me about flexibility increasing with age is actually true.
Dec 10, 2009, 02:05:39 nous wrote:
There's some interesting, free reading at [url=http://www.cmcrossroads.com...]Brad Appleton's site[/url] that pulls together information from many books on stretching. Think it used to be posted on Usenet back in the day. You can download the whole shebang as a pdf.
I've been going small into [url=http://product.half.ebay.co...] Yoga for Wimps[/url] over the last couple weeks. I picked it up years ago when my ulnar neuropathy was flaring up but didn't do much with it. My wife has been doing Pilates for a year and started yoga this summer and she swears by them both, but I have to cheat every pose. Yoga for Wimps is focused on us cheaters rather than showing the full-on pose and then giving the cheats as a footnote.
Whatever the case, all this slumping at a desk is doing me no favors. Have to do something for my wrists, shoulders and back.
Dec 10, 2009, 02:54:38 John Thullen wrote:
I stretch before sports but I should do more (or least something) during the off-season.
In college, I lived in a house with about 15 guys (there were always twice as many people there, day and night, but that's another 12 stories). It was campus housing so we had to carry on a ruse that we were providing some sort of academic and other enrichment, so we'd sponser various activities.
One shortlived idea was a yoga and meditation class (this was back in the Maharishi days) taught by an Indian gentleman who lived in our small college town.
Sitting crosslegged on the floor has always been and will always be utter torture for me, so the idea of meditating and relaxation in that position for any length of time was laughable for me, except I wasn't laughing .. I was clenched in pain, tyring to keep good posture. My mantra was "Jesuseffingchrist".
The class was coed (for the usual reasons including gender equity). Thing is, the instructor allegedly spent a lot of time laying his lands on the coeds, adjusting their posture so to speak in a Sexy Sadie sort of way and accusations and controversy soon followed and pretty soon, before you could say Hare Krishna, no more yoga and meditation (or what there was moved upstairs, ha ha) and I was put out of my misery.
Dec 10, 2009, 23:59:14 DonaldJ wrote:
"what my instructor tells me about flexibility increasing with age is actually true."
Not my experience, but the data is screwed up by the fact that I don't stretch as much as I used to.
In the running books and also, iirc, in the NYT articles on fitness, there's been a reaction against stretching. You need to be flexible for taekwando and some other sports, they acknowledge, but supposedly there's no evidence that (for runners anyway) stretching prevents injury.
Which seems to go flatly against my own experience. Whenever I get serious about my running but am too lazy to do some stretching afterwards, I get very tight and then, inevitably, I have a back injury. So I don't know what's going on with those studies. Maybe some of us need to stretch and some of us don't.
Dec 11, 2009, 02:47:02 nous wrote:
Donald - I went and chased down a few of the studies that were cited on running pages and it seems to me that the conclusions about stretching being drawn by runners and popular writers exceed those being drawn by the studies. What the studies seem to show (to me) is that runners who stretch are no less likely to get injured than those who do, but that doesn't seem like a productive conclusion to me. In one of the major studies, for instance, the majority of injuries reported were overtraining injuries like knee and ankle injuries and shinsplints (102) versus muscle tweaks like achilles and hamstring injuries, etc. (42), which sounds to me like stretching was incidental to the nature of the injury in most cases. There was much greater correlation between in jury and higher mileage, speed and frequency of competition than with stretching, but those conclusions aren't going to sell many running magazines.
As for the other conclusion, that stretching is less important for more regular and repetitive endurance exercises like running and cycling, I note that these studies were mostly looking at performance results and participant flexibility. Nothing in these studies say that stretching is not good for you, merely that sometimes people who are less flexible are better suited to repetitive, linear activity than those who are more flexible and therefore less biomechanically efficient for this one particular type of movement.
At least that is what I'm getting from these. I'm no kinesiologist, but then neither are most of the writers for Runner's World.
My guess is that stretching may not help one run faster, but it doesn't do any harm as long as one is doing it safely, not developing any muscle imbalances, and not doing it in the hopes that it will compensate for overtraining.
Dec 11, 2009, 10:50:11 nous wrote:
I should add that if anyone here is interested in these studies and can't get access to them because they require subscription, I can pass them on to you as a pdf file.
Dec 12, 2009, 02:02:40 Slartibartfast wrote:
One of the things my instructors say is "a long muscle is a strong muscle".
Not sure if that's really true, but it's a possibility that helps me continue with stretching.
Oh, <a href="http://74.125.93.132/search...">here</a>'s an article that talks about that. It's 16 years old, so it might be completely wrong by now :)
Dec 12, 2009, 02:03:11 Slartibartfast wrote:
Oh, bother.
Article is [url="http://74.125.93.132/search..."]here[/url]
Dec 12, 2009, 05:51:29 DonaldJ wrote:
Thanks nous. No need to supply me with the studies but thanks for the offer. What you say makes sense--also, as I said earlier, my own personal experience is that I have to do some stretching or I always get into trouble later on. Apparently there are some people who can run and never bother to stretch, but I'm not one of them.
Dec 17, 2009, 00:18:40 nous wrote:
I have another book at home here that advocates Active Isolated Stretching (short repetitions of specific stretches -- 2 seconds 10 times working specific agonist/antagonist pairs. I'm giving it a try after running in the mornings to see how it works. It's so hard to separate the effective methods from the marketing hype and the exercise folklore. Wish someone would do a study comparing results from different types of stretching and yoga.
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