If you are anything like the average person, you almost certainly spend time stretching, either just before or immediately after exercise.
For many, post workout stretching is almost essential. Over the years, stretching out has been endorsed as a way to reduce your injury risk, enhance exercise performance, and ease muscle pain after strength training.
Stretching is used by so many people in the belief that it reduces the risk of strains and sprains, it’s rare to hear anybody query its value. Yet, notwithstanding almost worldwide acceptance, there exists little or no data showing that stretching prior to exercise has any influence on injury risk.
The notion that stretching removes lactic acid in muscles highlights two of the biggest fitness fallacies going. Specifically, that it is a “waste product” that creates muscle fatigue, and that it brings about the soreness you experience within your muscles the day or two following a challenging workout.
Most people, regardless of whether they have entered a fitness center, already know about lactic acid. It’s likely that you’ve been told that it accumulates inside your muscles during exercise, causes that uncomfortable “burning” sensation, and ultimately makes your muscles give up.
Truth is, far from being a waste product, lactic acid is really a source of fuel for your muscles. Actually, one reason that intense training helps you train harder and longer is that it makes your muscles better at utilizing lactic acid.The concept lactic acid is bad is among the classic blunders in the history of science.
What about the concept that lactic acid causes muscle soreness?
Lactic acid has absolutely nothing to do with delayed-onset muscle soreness. In fact, a lot of the lactic acid has disappeared from your muscles soon after exercise, irrespective of whether you decide to do any stretching.
How come your muscles get sore a day or two after training?
A bout of unaccustomed or unusually rigorous exercise leads to inflammation – the same biological defense mechanism that creates the redness, swelling and pain when you cut your hand.
Inflammation is the body’s reaction to injury and helps to commence the process of restoration and healing. And one of the steps in this process is an increase in the production of immune cells, which reach a high 24-48 hours after activity.
These cells then generate chemical compounds that make pain receptors in your body – which are responsible for the transmission of certain pain signals – more sensitive.
The result?
When you move, these pain receptors are stimulated. Because they are considerably more sensitive to pain than usual, you wind up feeling sore.
On a relevant note, I ought to also mention that stretching after exercise doesn’t seem to have much of an effect where muscle soreness is involved.
When a number of New Zealand investigators reviewed a number of muscle soreness experiments, they found that stretching after exercise resulted in an average decline in post-exercise pain of just 2% – an outcome that’s likely to be of “no practical significance” for most of us.
Of course, this does not suggest that you shouldn’t perform any stretching after a workout. However, if you’re only doing so because you’ve been told that stretching eliminates lactic acid in muscles, or that it’s likely to decrease muscle soreness, there’s very little research to demonstrate that it makes any real difference.
Categories : Lora's Posts
Sorry! This article is unable to leave response!