The trouble with stretching before a run
Plus 10 Argentina & Norway half marathons for the traveling runner
“Moving outward is an act of courage, and in my life, running has also been a vehicle of introduction — to people, places, cultures and animals. I have run races on all seven continents. Running may be the connective tissue, but the true essence of the sport is a passage to a bigger world.” — Bart Yasso
When I coached my son’s soccer team this fall, it was my first time ever coaching anything. So on the first day of practice, I looked around to see what the other dads and coaches were doing with their players to warm up.
Copying them, I put down cones on the field and had my 10 players — all of whom were 4- and 5-years old, mind you — line up to do drills. One by one, they dribbled the ball around the cones, passing it back and forth, and lining up in front of the goal to practice kicking into it.
Sound like fun? Not to a 4-year-old.
No wonder, then, that instead of a practice going off like clockwork, mine was mainly the kids goofing off, giggling and chasing each other around. All of which are great fun (!), but have nothing to do with soccer.
After the practice and a little Googling at home, I found some routines that were perfect for kids their age.
They were designed to keep practice fun and energetic, mainly by having me run around the field with the kids chasing after me — with the promise that I’d act like any animal they wanted (no matter how silly or crazy it looks) if they hit me with the ball.
Here’s the thing, though: even though I knew this would work better than the line drills we did the first day, it still took me a few practices to start doing them.
It was harder than I thought it would be to do things differently than the other coaches, especially with the parents looking on.
How does this relate to running?
It can be hard to change our routines, even when no one is looking. For example, do you stretch before you run?
If you’re like me, the answer for years and years was “yes.” I picked up a stretching routine from my high school soccer coach, one we’d use before every practice and game — stretching our hamstrings, leg muscles, torso and shoulders, every single time.
The idea was to loosens up our muscles and lower our chances of getting injured. I believed it for a long time, too, and carried it over to every time I ran as an adult, up until a few years ago.
How did it help me? Honestly I can’t say; I did end up with an Achilles tendon injury that sidelined me from running for a year.
But even after I came back, for years I kept on stretching. In fact, it wasn’t until I read Gretchen Reynolds’s book “The First Twenty Minutes” a few years ago that I stopped.
In the book, the New York Times health writer takes a deep dive into whether stretching does us any good at all. This quote is a great summary of what she found:
“Most of us learned how to warm up in grade school, by touching our toes and slowly stretching our muscles, and haven’t changed our routines much since. Science, however, has moved on. In the past decade, a growing number of studies have shown that static stretching not only does not prepare muscles for activity; it almost certainly does the reverse.”
Static stretching — that’s the kind of stretching that I did all those years and that you likely do — is the problem. It can have big effects, too, including reducing the strength in the muscles you stretch by as much as 30 percent.
The effects can last for up to half an hour, she adds, a critical time when you’re just getting started with a run or a race, and when you really want to feel strong.
“In a few key real-world studies, basketball players who stretched before a game were unable to jump as high during play as when they hadn’t stretched,” Reynolds writes in the book.
The researchers were surprised to find that not stretching actually helped runners’ performance. But when they looked at their data, it made sense:
“Think of a rubber band. If it’s overstretched and limp, it doesn’t snap back when pulled and released. So, too, with your hamstrings: If they’re loose, they don’t efficiently lengthen, shorten, and snap back into place with each stride. To some degree, as an endurance athlete, you can be flexible as Gumby, or you can be good.”
To put it succinctly, flexibility is highly overrated.
So what should you do before a run?
Reynolds is careful to note that static stretching is what’s problematic when you’re preparing to work out — not warming up.
In fact, a warmup routine is essential for endurance athletes of every stripe (and if you run regularly, yes I consider you an endurance athlete!).
Here’s what the experts tell us to focus on, she adds:
A warmup routine that increases the range of motion in the joints we plan to use in our exercise, and
Literally warming up our bodies
If your warmup routine does those two things, it’s a good one. For a long run or a race, that means some light jogging for a few minutes before you start. If you’re planning on walking and running, a measure of both that progressively gets quicker is a good way to warm up.
Don’t warm up too vigorously or for too long, Reynolds adds. “A number of recent studies have shown that an overly vigorous aerobic warm-up simply makes you tired,” she writes. No argument there!
Bringing this back to where we started, sometimes it’s hard to make changes to our fitness routines, even when we know something new is what we should try. I had a harder time with it than I imagined I would.
But, as my experience with my son’s soccer team showed, sometimes that new idea or way of doing things is what’s been calling to us all along.
Changing up our practice routines made a huge difference — it made it fun for my players so they’d run and kick the ball together, having fun with it — and dropping my old stretching routine has made a difference for my running, too. I haven’t had an injury since then.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, too — do you do a pre-run warmup or stretching routine? Does it help or hurt?
Hope all is well in your world and you had a wonderful Thanksgiving — give a shout out if you ran a Turkey Trot or a marathon or half this past weekend!
Your friend,
— Terrell
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‘Last Chance’ Race Discount
The folks who organize the USA Beach Running Championships are offering one last chance to save 15% off the entry fee for their race next spring:
USA Beach Running Championships Half Marathon in Cocoa Beach, Fla., on Sunday, May 12, 2019 — use discount code “LASTCHANCE”
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