Warm up / cool down: tips for stretching
Posted by: Steven Bazzea

When you stretch, it is more effective if the muscles are already warmed up. A warm up entails light activity, similar to what your exercise will be, for ten to fifteen minutes. Such activity increases blood flow to the muscles you’ll be using and gets them ready to work.

Warming up also helps to reduce stiffness, making the muscles suppler. I like to use the example of toffee, which is stiff and brittle when it’s cold. When you warm it up, it becomes more pliable and stretches easily. Think of your muscles in the same way. As the muscle fibres warm up, they become more pliable and supple, and stretch more easily. If you warm up first, your stretching exercises will be more effective and efficient, you’ll make greater gains than if you’re stretching cold, and you’ll be less likely to injure yourself.

In the ideal world, we stretch after warming up, exercise, then stretch again after exercise as part of the cool down process. The reasoning behind stretching before and after exercise goes like this:

Stretch the muscles before a workout to get them ready to perform at their optimum length. This optimum length allows the muscles to develop the most power as they work.

Stretch the muscles after exercise while they’re still warm to bring them back to their optimum resting length. As muscles work, they repeatedly contract and shorten, and they tend to stay short when the workout is over unless you stretch them again. Post-exercise stretching can be incorporated into the cool down.

If time is a factor (and when isn’t it these days?), we recommend skipping the pre-exercise stretching and concentrating on post-exercise stretching. If you don’t stretch before exercise, be sure to complete a thorough warm up, before getting into your main workout. Post-exercise stretching will return those tired muscles to their normal resting length as you go about the rest of your daily activities.

In post-exercise stretching there is some danger of overstretching the muscles, because they may be too pliable. But if done with awareness, the risk is minimal and is far outweighed by the benefits gained.

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