subject: Are You Making This Big Mistake Before Exercising And Switching Your Muscles Off? [print this page] Static stretching is where you take a muscle through its full range of motion and hold it there for a length of time. This is a great way to ensure you lengthen muscles back to their original length after a workout session, and to flush away waste products after a hard session. It is also a great way to build flexibility in muscles that are too tight for optimal function.
However, indiscriminate use of static stretching before working out can actually hinder your performance, and even worse, could risk injury.
This is because, stretching effectively switches off your muscle. This is great at the end of a session, when you want to bring your body back to normal, but at the beginning of a session you want to be firing your muscles up, getting them ready for the workout ahead, not switching them off!
There is an exception to this rule, however. If you are so tight in certain muscles (usually the hamstrings, calves and trapezius muscles, but we all differ) that the tightness compromises your ability to effectively perform movements, then you actually want to deactivate these muscles so that you can move more effectively.
So, what should you be doing before you exercise?
You do want to mobilise all the joints and limber up your muscles, so simply jogging for a few minutes is not really enough. To effectively fire up all your muscles, while also getting the joints loosened up, you should do some dynamic stretches.
Dynamic stretching involves taking the joint through the full range of motion, but rather than holding at the end, you move back and forth from each extreme. So you would perform chest and back opening, by crossing your arms in front of you, then pulling your elbows back behind you, and moving dynamically between the two positions, changing the angle each time and building up the range of motion each time. For the legs, you can swing the leg back and forwards, and perform squatting movements. You can also perform shoulder and arm circles, as well as ankle circles in each direction.
Another great movement to include in your warm up is the 'bootstrapper'. You fold forwards, place your hands on the floor, then drop the hips down as low as you can (you will need to start with fairly wide feet to start with and as you loosen up you can bring them closer together, towards hip width). Reach the arms overhead while you stay low, then come all the way up to standing. Not as easy as it sounds - try it and see your mobility improve over time!
Going through every joint in the body will progressively warm the body up while firing the muscles up and priming your body for the activity to come.
