Post Workout Stretching: What Are the Benefits?
If you are anything like most people, you almost certainly spend some time stretching, either just before or immediately after training.
For many people, post workout stretching is almost essential. Over time, stretching has been promoted as a way to decrease your risk of injury, improve exercise performance, and alleviate muscle soreness after exercise.
Stretching is used by so many people in the belief that it reduces the risk of strains and sprains, it’s uncommon to hear anybody query its benefit. However, in spite of more or less worldwide acceptance, there is very little proof to show that stretching before exercise has any impact on injury .
The notion that stretching gets rid of lactic acid in muscles illustrates 2 of the greatest fitness fallacies going. Specifically, that it’s a "waste product" which causes muscle fatigue, and that it leads to the soreness you feel in your muscles the day or 2 after a tough workout.
Most people, regardless of whether they have set foot in a health club, have heard about lactic acid. It’s likely that you have been told that it accumulates inside your muscles during exercise, causes that uncomfortable "burning" feeling, and ultimately makes your muscles give out.
Truth is, far from being a waste product, lactic acid is actually a source of energy for your muscles. In fact, one of the reasons that intense training makes it possible to train harder and longer is that it makes your muscles better at utilizing lactic acid.The notion that lactic acid is detrimental is amongst the classic mistakes in the history of science.
What about the concept that lactic acid brings about muscle soreness?
Lactic acid has nothing to do with post-exercise muscle soreness. The truth is, a lot of the lactic acid is gone from your muscles soon after exercise, regardless of whether you choose to do any stretching.
Exactly why do your muscles get sore a day or two after training?
A session of unaccustomed or unusually intensive exercise brings about inflammation – precisely the same biological protection system that triggers the redness, swelling and pain if you cut your skin.
Inflammation is the human body’s response to injury and helps to begin the whole process of restoration and healing. And one of the steps in this process is an surge in the production of immune cells, which hit a peak 1-2 days after exercise.
These cells then produce chemical compounds that make pain receptors in your body – which are responsible for the transmission of certain pain signals – very sensitive.
The result?
When you move, these pain receptors are activated. Since they will be significantly more responsive to pain than usual, you wind up feeling sore.
On a related note, I ought to also point out that post-exercise stretching doesn’t appear to do much in so far as muscle soreness is concerned.
When a group of New Zealand scientists evaluated several muscle soreness studies, they discovered that stretching after exercise resulted in an average decrease in post-exercise pain of just two percent – a result that’s likely to end up of "no practical significance" for most people.
Obviously, this does not imply that you should not perform any post workout stretching. But if you’re only doing so because you’ve been assured that stretching eliminates lactic acid in muscles, or that it’s going to decrease muscle soreness, there’s minimal evidence to show that it makes any kind of real difference.