Continuing on with stretching Last time I looked at the hard facts. Now let's take a look at what the experts do with that information. One thing to keep in mind, the last source I used in that previous post was just released. I doubt anyone has really done much with it.

I found a bunch of different points of view on this subject and I'm going to highlight three articles/posts I stumbled onto. The first being a guy who mentioned a conference he went to to hear Yuri Verkhoshansky, who is the godfather (pretty sure creator) of plyometrics. He simpled told everyone at the conference, don't do static stretches. Oh, this was in 2005 when this research on stretching was just being researched. Either he knew this from his personal experiences or he knew what information was about to come out.


It seemed the moment I read that static stretching is bad the next thing I read was Mike Boyle saying that it's stupid to not static stretch. People either love or hate Mike Boyle. I'm pretty sure he was banned from NSCA for his views on strength training. NSCA are the ones who run the CSCS certification, they are basically the gold standard for strength and conditioning. I love Mike Boyle's punk rock style of athletic training and how strongly he holds to his convictions. In the article I found (the more extreme of the two he has) on static stretching he basically calls out everyone who is against it.

I'm hoping most of the people who read my blog know who Dave Tate is. If you don't he runs EliteFTS and trained with Louie Simmons over at Westside Barbell. I love how gritting Tate's views are. He puts it simply, if you need to be flexible, stretch stupid. If you don't need to be flexible why are you wasting your time stretching when there are so many other things you could be doing to help yourself improve.

He said one thing that really struck me.

“Competitive athletics is about performance first and health second. Anyone who says differently is full of crap and has never pushed the body to places it wasn’t designed to go. The bottom line is the body wasn’t designed to compete in high level competitive athletics. We train it to do what it isn’t intended to do. In this event, it’s safe to say “sh*t happens,” and it’s part of the game.” 

It didn't shock me, I just love how he boiled it all down and took away all the politically correct statements. Do everything just shy of killing yourself for gold, if you didn't you weren't trying hard enough.

Rounding out the post comes middle of the road Dan John. I relate more to Dan than I do anyone else. He seems to always look at a problem from every possible angle and then decide what the real answer is. 

I've always been a believer that the answers to all questions are always in the middle. Extremes only lead to imbalances. The problem is that the middle takes more work. With the extremes you can take a stand and hold strong while the middle you have to defend and attack both sides.

I heard Dan John say this stuff in his DVD that he released along side of his book Never Let Go, which I highly suggest. The material blew my mind because suddenly stretching wasn't black and white. Certain areas need stretching and others don't. 

Here's what he had to say on it.

To simplify, Janda separated muscles into two groups: Tonic, which tend to shorten when tired (or old!) and Phasic, which tend to weaken under stress (or age, I dare say).

Muscles That Get Tighter (Tonic)	Muscles That Get Weaker (Phasic)
Upper Trapezius	Rhomboids
Pectoralis Major (Chest)	Mid-back
Biceps	Triceps
Pectoralis Minor (deep chest muscle)	Gluteus Maximus
Psoas (Those hip flexors that get bad press)	Deep Abs
Piriformis	External Obliques
Hamstrings	Deltoids
Calf Muscles

So rather than going through a routine of stretching muscles that don't matter focus, on the tonic muscles listed above by Dan.

To wrap this up, yes it's more work because you have to figure out the stretches for problem areas rather than just giving a set number of stretches that your coach handed down to you.

Oh, I'm still not sure what to do with the fact that weight lifting is as good as static stretching but that seems like something that will have to be researched further to make sense of anyways.

Academic Research stretching Warm Ups