Busting Stretching Myths

Dr Mel Siff in his usual style, addresses a number of myths about stretching in this great post from the Supertrainig Mailing List - here is the question that brought his response In keeping with this discussion I recently found an excellent literature review- "Myths and Truths of Stretching" at the following website: physsportsmed.com It discussed some interesting principles such as desensitisation to stretch rather the muscle spindle lengthening, which make one think about our treatments and advices in the past. **Several of us have been questioning the necessity for the use of dedicated "stretching" and "warming up" sessions for many years, so it is good to see a review of this stature examining these issues in depth (see Siff MC "Facts and Fallacies of Fitness" 2000). I also like to point out that stretching exercise (which are meant to deform tissues) are not necessarily the same as flexibility exercises (which are meant to increase range of movement). There are several interesting issues in Shriers article on stretching facts and myths (THE PHYSICIAN & SPORTSMEDICINE - Vol 28 - No. 8 - Aug 2000), such as this one: < With respect to alleviating the pain associated with stiffness, the weight of the evidence suggests that the decrease in stiffness is not as important as the increase in "stretch tolerance". Briefly, an increase in stretch tolerance means that patients feel less pain for the same force applied to the muscle. The result is increased range of motion, even though true stiffness does not change. This could occur through increased tissue strength or analgesia; however, increased stretch tolerance that occurs immediately after stretching must be caused by an analgesic effect because tissue strength does not increase during 2 minutes of stretching. Unfortunately, evidence of a possible analgesic effect is recent, and the underlying mechanism is unknown. After weeks of stretching, increases in stretch tolerance could theoretically occur because stretch-induced hypertrophy may increase tissue strength , and/or an analgesia effect may be present. > *The use of the term "analgesic" may not be entirely appropriate. While there may be an as yet identified analgesic effect associated with intense stretching, this may be greatly overshadowed by an accommodation effect which changes the Rating of Perceived Effort (or pain) with regular imposition of progressively increased stretching loads. This happens with all lifting - the load progressively feels lighter and the lifter then can execute more reps or a heavier 1 rep max. This is not necessarily the same as the so-called disinhibition effect which is an objective altering of nervous processes in the body - it is an effect that is more subjectively psychological in origin (even though it also obviously involves neural processes). Despite the very useful and interesting nature of this review, the reference list was disappointingly small and it made no use of some really relevant work by Russian scientists such as Iashvili (see Ch 3 of Siff & Verkhoshansky "Supertraining" 1999). At least, the high profile given to this article will tend to make the fitness pros and sports coaches start wondering a lot more about all those traditional ideas about stretching and warming up.

Dr Mel Siff Author of Supertraining + Facts and Fallacies of Fitness http://www.drmelsiff.com