Runners, triathletes, and other endurance athletes: static stretching prior to your activity is detrimental to your performance, a new study shows. It has been well- accepted for quite some time that static ( non-moving or "stretch-and-hold") stretching prior to activity is harmful to the performance of anaerobic athletes. Many studies show statistically significant performance decrements in strength and power athletes when they employ static stretching pre-exercise. For more, please go to my previous post Worry the Bottle, Mama, It's Grapefruit Wine
This new study(published in the latest Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research) that endurance athletic performance is also negatively impacted by pre-activity static stretching. Note that the non-stretching group sat quietlyfor the same period of time (16 minutes) that the stretching group stretched. So, we still don't know if dynamic stretchingwould be beneficial for endurance athletes, as has been shown for strength/power athletes.
For now, endurance athletes would apparently benefit from sitting quietly pre-race rather than stretching in the traditional way. As Steely Dan puts it: "No static at all."
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