Many athletes do their stretching at this precise moment and this is a big mistake according to this coach.
Exercising is a good thing, probably one of the best if you want to stay fit every day. But playing sports can also cause a lot of pain depending on the type of exercise, its intensity or the posture you adopt. And depending on your practices, the risk of injury can even increase considerably.
Many athletes, for example, do and recommend doing stretches to warm up in order to better prepare their body for exercise. Error and even gross according to this coach! For Dr. Josh Goldman, associate director of the Sports Medicine Center at UCLA Health, stretching before sports is a myth that needs to be dispelled. According to the specialist, by doing such an action, you weaken “all muscle groups you are trying to train”.
We often confuse stretching with warming up. Obviously, before doing any practice, intense or not intense, you must prepare your body for the effort, but stretching before exercise can cause some unpleasant surprises and in particular injuries. When muscles are warmed up, they move more easily, become more flexible and blood flows better through the blood vessels. But when you stretch before warming up your body, you are not warming up the muscles and if you stretch cold you can even cause serious injuries. Studies have even shown that stretching without warming up leads to a long-term reduction in muscle strength.
So when should you do your stretching? For those who, reading this article, felt reassured because they do their stretching not before practicing sports, but just after, there is still cause for concern: this is not the time either ideal according to Josh Goldman who recommends doing your stretching at a completely different time. According to the expert, ideally you should stretch your muscles “just before going to bed”.
If your routine is broken after this explanation and you still want to do stretching before your daily sport, don’t panic! The important thing is that your body increases its temperature by 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius above average to be fully fit to exercise. Once that’s done, you can do your stretches.
There are also two types, static and dynamic. Static stretching involves holding a simple position to perform the stretch for about 10 to 30 seconds, such as trying to touch your toes with your hands. Dynamic stretching consists of a series of movements that you repeat over a period of time. These controlled movements serve to stretch the muscle fibers.