Why you need to be stretching and foam rolling.

If you train with a PT you've probably been told to "warm up", before your workout and "cool down" afterwards, but do you know why?

Simply being told to do something isn't a good way to develop a new habit, you need to understand the why behind it and appreciate the benefits in order to successfully adhere to a protocol.

First of all, there are 2 types of stretching, dynamic stretching (done before a workout) and static stretching (done after a workout).

Dynamic stretching plays a huge role in warming up the joins and muscles before we start applying load. When we weight train we are applying load to the muscle fibres they contract in order to support the weight, and depending on the exercise the contraction can happen in either the lengthened or shortened position. Now, imagine your muscle is a frozen rubber band. If you were to proceed to try to stretch that rubber band while frozen it would snap and break, the same would happen to your muscles (in a way). Do you ever notice your stiff after waking up, or after long periods of sitting down? Before proceeding to train, we want to take our body through a range of warm ups, all similar to the movements we plan on training. So, for example: If you are planning on doing squats, deadlifts and lunge variations, you'd do warms ups that involved those same movements (body weight squats, lunges, and hinge movements using low weight etc.)

Just as a door hinge needs oiling to keep it moving smoothly, our joints need a little bit of warming up and mobility work before we jump straight into our session. The quality of a session can be reliant upon how well you warm up before.

Static stretching and foam rolling after the fact is equally as important. As stated above, when we apply load to a movement, our muscles contract in order to support the load. At the end of our workout we need to then release that tension through stretching and foam rolling.

The damaged muscle fibres repair themselves through a multitude a factors such as nutrition and hydration, but something that helps speed up the process is increased blood flow. Strategies like massages, foam rolling, pressure sleeves, hot/cold showers, etc help increase blood flow, making the DOMs much less severe. These strategies also help release tension and ease the contracted muscles, making movement smoother, as well as stretching.

The same goes for stretching. Did you know you want to hold a stretch for a minimum of 30 seconds? That’s because it takes that long before our bodies protective mechanism, the myotatic reflex, to begins to get the signal that it is safe to release and allows you to test that stretch going deeper and deeper. That’s why when we stretch we find that it’s quite hard to hold that stretch at the start, but the longer you challenge that stretch, the easier it gets and the deeper you can get.

So, the take away?

1.Practice movement and mobility, warming up the movements you plan on training before your session.

2. Stretch, release and foam roll after your workout, it’ll make you less painful and keep you moving easily.

3. Take your time. Don’t rush your mobility work pre and post workout.

4. The effectiveness and quality of a workout can be determined by the effectiveness and quality of your warm up and pre-training routines.

I hope that was helpful.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to comment below :)