Top benefits of stretching
The benefits of stretching are many, but here are the top ones:
- Maintaining/improving flexibility
- Maintaining/improving mobility
- Improving blood flow
- Preventing body injuries
- Improving muscle power
- Improving proprioception
The first two, maintaining and improving flexibility and mobility, are the main reasons why everyone needs to stretch. But why is that?
Let’s start by clarifying the definition of both.
Flexibility is the ability of any part of your body to move passively until a maximum point, for example, how far someone can lift your leg towards your head.
Mobility is the ability of any part of your body to move actively until a maximum point, for example, how far you can lift your leg towards your head without helping the movement.
As you can quickly realize, flexibility is always greater than mobility, and that’s normal.
For the people asking themselves what the link to stretching is, let’s simply say that our muscles are responsible for all active movements of our bodies. If they are too tense, our maximum movement range (flexibility) will be shorter as they will prohibit movement after a certain point.
And if flexibility decreases, mobility decreases as well eventually.
The problem is that as we age if we don’t move and stretch regularly, both flexibility and mobility decrease, even if we don’t practice any sports!
Indeed, a lot of people think that muscles only get tense if they are exercised, but that is not true. Muscles can get tense for many reasons, especially the lack of physical exercise.
That’s one of the reasons why you see a big difference between a child falling and an old person.
In the first case, although the child can have some bruises and cuts, he will generally don’t break anything except if the shock is very strong. In the second case, even if the shock is slight, the old person generally breaks a bone or worse.
The exception is for old persons who have been stretching during their life and have maintained good flexibility and mobility.
Here’s how you can start stretching today
Except if you did not know that stretching is vital before reading this, you are most likely procrastinating about it.
Apart from all the solutions to procrastination and the good old “kick in the butt,” we can bring down one of the main excuses people give not to stretch: it requires too much time.
That’s not true. First, all sports require more time than stretching, so for people doing sports and lacking stretching, this excuse doesn’t stand.
Second, for people that are crazy busy all day long, a minimalistic stretching session can last no more than 20 min, and stretching can be done while doing other activities (commuting, reading, studying, etc.), even if it’s not ideal.
Factoring that, no one can say that he can’t spend 20 min 2-3 x per week to stretch.
Finally, we can say that the lack of stretching is a silent disease that only creates evident symptoms when it’s very advance.
Therefore, even if you don’t see or feel the need to stretch, we recommend that you do it anyway as often as possible. If you do, you will then benefit from all the advantages of stretching and feeling much better in your body after doing it.