Thursday, August 21, 2008

Do not stretch before you sprint.

We have touched on this before.

Here is another study - this time in the context of football - which identifies that you should not do static stretching as part of your warm up.....

The Effect of Static Stretching on Phases of Sprint Performance in Elite Soccer Players.

Static stretching before sprinting resulted in slower times in all three performance variables. These findings provide evidence that static stretching exerts a negative effect on sprint performance and should not be included as part of the preparation routine for physical activity that requires sprinting.


2 comments:

Scott Kustes said...

Definitely! Never do static stretching before any power-oriented activity. Before I sprint, I do a nice 15 minute warmup of dynamic stretching, skips, bounding, light jogging, and other such drills. Save the stretching for afterwards.

Cheers
Scott Kustes
Modern Forager

Anonymous said...

There are two large studies underway on stretching and athletic performance, one in the US and the other in Norway and Australia (both still accepting participants I believe). Already it is being learned that stretching has a social norm (fad) component that is driven by location (country) with disagreement on when and how, probably due to the fact that good data is scarce and if there really was compelling evidence for the benefits of stretching everyone would already know what kind to do and when to do it.