Training

More on the perils of pre-run stretching

March 18, 2010
By Alex Hutchinson

I posted last month about a new study on how static stretching before your run makes you slower and less efficient. To find out more about the study, I got in touch with the lead author, FSU’s Jacob Wilson. The result is this week’s Jockology column:

For years, researchers have been finding that the more flexible you are, the less efficiently you run – a message that tradition-bound runners have been reluctant to hear. Now, research to be published later this year in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research makes it clear that some (but not all) prerun stretching makes you slower. [read the whole article]

The most significant new piece of news in the article is that Wilson and his colleagues have just finished a follow-up study, in which they used the exact same protocol to study dynamic stretching. They’re still completing the analysis, but the results appear to show no significant decrease in performance for pre-run dynamic stretching. This means that you can still get your flexibility fix before a run without compromising performance — you just need to use dynamic stretches instead of static ones. (Some examples, with illustrations, are provided in the Jockology article.)

Drilling deeper into the dynamic stretching data, Wilson said it appeared that the most experienced runners weren’t affected by the pre-run stretches. Less experienced and less fit runners, on the other hand, still saw a bit of performance decline, probably because the unfamiliar stretches fatigued them a bit. So make sure you practice these stretches before trying them in a race situation. (This last stuff is very preliminary, so it may not be statistically significant — we’ll have to wait until the study is published to see.)