I think back to everything I've learned over the course of my sports and fitness life. I was taught, as most of you, that you must go through a battery of stretches before I was to go participate in an activity. Usually they were in the form of sitting or standing and attempting to touch my toes, or something of that nature. I'm sure you can all think of those five or ten minutes of fun.
I first learned of dynamic stretching from a triathlon coach. It made sense, but it had no science behind it. I did a few of the dynamic stretches before runs and noticed that I was in fact more warmed up. As I embarked on to starting training to become a fitness trainer, it became pretty apparent pretty quickly, that this was a more optimal way to warm up.
To try to emphasize the need for people that may be reading this to try to change the way they think about stretching or warming up, may take a visual and some terminology.
The terms elasticity and placisity should be used when talking about muscles during a given type of activity. Think of a rubber band. When you pull the rubber band and let go, the rubber band snaps back to its pre-stretched size. This is elasticity. Now think of a peice of taffy. When you pull on it and let go it stays the same size as where you stopped pulling. Now move those two thoughts to muscles. Muscles with elasticity are going to be a lot more functional when exericeing than the ones that are pulled to a longer length. Add to
Now move those two characteristics to Dynamic and Static stretching. Dynamic stretching is a group of movements that put the muscles into an a warmed up elastic state, that will be more ready to function at an optimal level. This group of movements emulate real movements and make more sense in relation to a sport. If you are getting ready to run, why would you sit in a hurdler stretch and stetch to touch your toe? Static stretching does not emulate sport or fitness in most instances. Static stretching has scientifically been proven to put the muscle into a plasticity state. Think of the taffy. If the muscle is stretched to an elongated state, would that be very useful when it comes time to do an activity.
One more part of our anatomy should be taken into account and that is our joints. The younger crowd may not worry to much about these right now, but us that have inhabited the planet a little longer know what these are every morning when we get out of bed. Joints, for the most part, contain synovial fluid. When this fluid has sat for a while it gets a little bit like a stick of butter. Static stretching does nothing good for joints. If anything, it places stress upon them and that can lead to problems. A Dynamic warm up will basically melt the butter and that is what we want our synovial fluid to be when we go on a run, a bike ride, a swim or any other physical activity.
Here is a list of basic Dynamic movements that you can use to find your optimalwarmed up state. Give it a try. There are plenty of examples on you tube to see how these and many more are done.
light jog 50 or so meters
heel walks
walking knee hugs
walking lunges with a twist to the knee side
butt kickers
carioca
frog squats
slide and stretch
skips and lateral skips
back pedal jog
inch worms
Bear crawls
A Dynamic warmup is just what it sounds like...a warm up. You will be breathing hard and will have a sweat going. It should be factored into a workout in terms of ten minutes. Proper form should be used at all times and sufficient time to be taken to do the wamup with proper technique instead of just getting through it.
Static stretching does have its place and that is at the end of a workout. That is where plasticity should take place. Stretching the muscle will help it to become more flexible and enable recovery to happen faster.
Thank You and have a healthy day!
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