What Are The Benefits Of Stretching After A Workout?
If you are anything like most people, you may devote time to stretching, either just before or after exercise.
For most, post workout stretching is virtually essential. Throughout the years, stretching has been recommended as a way to reduce your injury risk, enhance exercise performance, and ease muscle pain after strength training.
Stretching is used by so many people in the belief that it reduces the risk of strains and sprains, it’s rare to hear anyone question its benefit. Nevertheless, regardless of almost universal acceptance, you will find almost no evidence showing that stretching prior to exercise has any impact on injury risk.
The notion that stretching gets rid of lactic acid in muscles highlights a couple of the greatest fitness misconceptions going. Namely, that it’s a “waste product” that creates muscle fatigue, and that it causes the soreness you feel within your muscles the day or two after a tough exercise session.
The majority of people, regardless of whether they have set foot in a gym, already know about lactic acid. Chances are you’ve been told that it builds up inside your muscles during exercise, causes that uncomfortable “burning” sensation, and ultimately makes your muscles give out.
Truth is, far from being a waste product, lactic acid is really a supply of power for your muscles. In fact, one of the reasons that intense training helps you train harder and for a longer time is that it makes your muscles better at utilizing lactic acid.The concept lactic acid is detrimental is amongst the classic mistakes in the history of science.
How about the notion that lactic acid triggers muscle soreness?
Lactic acid has nothing to do with DOMS. In fact, most of the lactic acid is gone from your muscles shortly after exercise, whether or not you decide to do any stretching.
Exactly why do your muscles get sore a day or two after working out?
A bout of unaccustomed or unusually intensive exercise brings about inflammation – precisely the same natural defense mechanism that triggers the redness, swelling and pain when you cut your skin.
Inflammation is the body’s response to damage so helping to begin the process of restoration and healing. And one of the stages in this process is an surge in the production of immune cells, which hit a peak 1-2 days after exercise.
These cells then generate chemical substances that make pain receptors within your body – which are responsible for the transmission of dull, aching pain signals – very sensitive.
The outcome?
When you move, these pain receptors are activated. Because they’re considerably more responsive to pain than usual, you find yourself feeling sore.
On a relevant note, I should also point out that post-exercise stretching doesn’t appear to have much of an effect where muscle soreness is concerned.
When a number of New Zealand investigators examined several muscle soreness experiments, they discovered that stretching after exercise brought about an average decline in post-exercise soreness of just 2% – a result that’s likely to end up of “no practical significance” for most people.
Of course, this doesn’t imply that you shouldn’t perform any stretching after a workout. However, if you’re only doing it because you have been advised that stretching gets rid of lactic acid in muscles, or that it’s likely to minimize muscle soreness, there exists little research to demonstrate that it makes any genuine difference.