I have been coaching runners for over 30 years and along the way I have learned some amazing things. This article and video talks about one of them: Stretches for runners is no-no!
This is a transcription of the video:
Stretches for Runners: Don’t Do Them!
Mike Caton: Early in my coaching career, like a lot of coaches, I used to have my athletes stretch before practice and even during if they were tight, until somebody show me something that made me think that stretching might not be such a good idea. So I tried to experiment: I didn’t let my athletes stretch and something amazing happened: all our injuries went away! That was more than 10 years ago, and from that point on we’ve never stretched at practice, never regretted it and never looked back. We have much less injuries than we used to, so today I’m gonna show you what I learned.
I’m going to take one of my runners, Lily, to see a muscle activation technique specialist to demonstrate how bad stretching is. You’re not gonna believe it. Literally, a lot of you’re going to think this is fake, but I assure you, it’s not.
Deb Hellman: Hi, I’m Den Hellman and I’m a muscle activation technique specialist. Here’s what I’m going to do today: I am going to test Lily’s muscle to make sure it’s functioning properly and then going to have Lily stretch the muscle and then I’m going to retest it to see what happened. Lily I’m going to test your rectus femorus for contractile capability, which means can you fight me when I tell you the direction of my force OK? So, I’m gonna be pushing straight down and when I say resist, give me everything so that you don’t let me do it, OK? Ready and resist. Perfect! That test just confirmed that your rectus femorus muscle, it’s a major hip flexor, and it can contract on demand, which means it’s working for you.
Now I want you to do a stretch. OK, Lily, what I want you to do is the typical running stretch on your right side. I want you to grab your foot and pull it up so that you feel a really nice stretch right in here and hold it for about five seconds. Lily, hop back up on the table and see what that stretch did. We just did a five second stretch on one of your main hip flexors. Let’s see what happens.
OK, keep that knee locked and I’m gonna go straight down you resist me when I say and ready, resist. Let’s try that again. Ready and resist. OK, you’ve got nothing.
Mike Caton: I know there’s gonna be some of you that are skeptical. You’re going to think, “oh, maybe Deb is pushing harder or easier one time. Maybe Lily is trying harder or easier one time”. But, I’m not selling anything here. I’m just trying to share my knowledge I learned over the years with as many people as possible, so hopefully you’ll believe me. I hope so because you’ll learn a really cool thing today.
Deb Hellman: So, what just happened is that very brief stretch that you did basically took the fibers ability to react to your nervous systems command to contract completely away. So, five seconds of a stretch and you just disrupted the work. What’s even more interesting is that disruption can last for up to five hours, if you’re lucky. You definitely don’t want to do that right before you go running.
Mike Caton: I would love to hear your thoughts on this. leave your comments below no matter what they are, even if you think this is bogus. I want to hear them
Lily: Can I stretch after I work out?
Deb Hellman: If you feel like you have tight muscles, that’s a message for you. That’s a message to your nervous system. Tightness is secondary to muscular inhibition somewhere else in the body, typically 180° around from where you’re tight. So my preference is that you do isometric exercises to reinforce the work I just did with the treatment.
Mike Caton: If you see the light on this, or if you just want to look into a little bit more, Deb has created a list of isometric contractions that you can do instead of stretching as a warm-up. I placed the link below this video where you can download it. (Here’s the link). And finally. if you want to learn more about Deb How many muscle activation techniques I provided links below for each. I’m Mike Caton and I’m passing it on.