What Are The Benefits Of Stretching After A Workout? January 4th, 2012
If you’re anything at all like the average person, you almost certainly spend time stretching, either just before or subsequent to exercise.
For many, stretching after a workout is virtually essential. Over the years, stretching has been backed as a way to lower your injury risk, enhance exercise performance, and reduce muscle pain after strength training.
Such is the popularity of stretching as a way to prevent injury, it’s rare to hear anyone query its importance. Nevertheless, in spite of virtually widespread approval, there is little or no evidence to demonstrate that stretching ahead of exercise has any effect on injury prevention.
The idea that stretching removes lactic acid in muscles highlights 2 of the largest fitness myths going. Specifically, it’s mainly a “waste product” that causes muscle fatigue, and that it causes the soreness you experience within your muscles the day or two following a challenging training session.
Most people, regardless of whether they’ve set foot in a fitness center, already know about lactic acid. Chances are you’ve been told that it accumulates in your muscles when you exercise, causes that painful “burning” sensation, and eventually makes your muscles give up.
The fact is, far from being a waste product, lactic acid is actually a source of power for your muscles. In fact, one of the reasons that intensive training helps you exercise harder and longer is that it makes your muscles better at making use of lactic acid.The concept lactic acid is bad is amongst the classic blunders in the history of science.
What about the thought that lactic acid causes muscle soreness?
Lactic acid has absolutely nothing to do with DOMS. In fact, most of the lactic acid has disappeared from your muscles soon after exercise, whether or not a person does any stretching.
Exactly why do your muscles get sore a day or two after exercise?
A bout of unaccustomed or unusually intense exercise leads to inflammation – the same natural safety system that creates the redness, swelling and pain when you cut your skin.
Inflammation is your human body’s response to damage so helping to start the process of restoration and recovery. And one of the stages in this process is an surge in the production of immune cells, which hit a high 24-48 hours after activity.
These cells then produce chemical compounds that make pain receptors inside your body – which are to blame for the transmission of certain pain signals – more sensitive.
The outcome?
Whenever you move, these pain receptors are activated. Since they will be way more responsive to pain than normal, you find yourself feeling sore.
On a related note, I ought to also point out that stretching after a workout doesn’t seem to do much in so far as muscle soreness is concerned.
When a group of New Zealand experts examined a number of muscle soreness studies, they found that stretching after training brought about an average reduction in post-exercise pain of just 2% – an outcome that’s likely to end up of “no practical significance” for most people.
Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t perform any post workout stretching. But if you’re only doing it because you have been informed that stretching gets rid of lactic acid in muscles, or that it’s likely to decrease muscle soreness, there exists very little evidence to show that it can make any kind of real difference.