Not long ago, I talked a friend into going on a run with me. He didn’t seem especially excited about it, but I knew I would have more motivation if I had a buddy. When his jogging pace turned out to be my all-out running pace, I realized I should’ve found my own motivation. But there was also another way we weren’t compatible exercise-mates: We had entirely different philosophies on stretching.
After our warm-up jog to the park, my friend promptly found some grass, sat down, and started stretching his hamstrings. I did my own pre-run preparation: leg kicks, upper-body rotations, and squats. We watched each other, silently judging the others’ rituals.
I was surprised. I thought everyone knew the mantra I go by: dynamic stretches before a workout, static stretches after (it’s what the USTA player development program recommends). My friend and I are the same age and both have been active in sports. Why wouldn’t we have learned the same techniques for stretching?
Then, when Tom Perrotta, a senior editor at TENNIS, sent me this article from the New York Times, I realized it’s not that simple. People stretch differently all over the world and for different reasons—increased flexibility, soreness and injury prevention, better performance. Others don’t stretch at all because they don't find it to be helpful.
No one really knows the best way to stretch because it’s never been studied. Now two large-scale stretching studies have been launched to find out things like whether stretching is beneficial, what it does, and what kinds of stretches are best. Without concrete evidence on stretching that these studies are looking to provide, it’s all down to personal preference.
One of the studies, the Stretching Trial, has participants record their results on the study’s website. So let’s have our own little Internet-based study. What are your rituals when it comes to stretching?
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