Most people that workout in a gym with weights get sucked into lifting more and more weight as often as possible. While all that strenuous lifting has the purpose of building strong and healthy muscles and bones, it will leave you with tight muscles and reduced mobility. Building a good amount of muscle mass is a good accomplishment as long as you understand that working out breaks down tissue and the body builds up during rest and proper nutrition. However one of the most overlooked and skipped parts of a workout are warming up before and stretching afterwards.
The stretching after a workout needs to be done with the same seriousness and intensity as the workout itself. Correct and serious stretching will round off the proper workouts and will help you achieve the desired goals avoiding major injury and pain.
Is Flexibility the Missing Connection
Flexibility training helps with any fitness program to increase the range of motion, protecting tight muscles, joints, ligaments, and tendons. Static stretching will provide you with the ability to extend such range of motion and give you the opportunity of a better healthier workout the next time around.
Some people prefer dynamic stretching, which also is greatly beneficial, as long as the stretching is done long enough and with the correct form. It is understandable that those people that work to build muscle mass and spend long periods of time in the gym, get exhausted and thus don’t want to spend additional time in the gym. Not stretching properly or not at all is the perfect recipe for future injuries and hard to control pain. Make time to stretch and you’ll save yourself from years of agony and unnecessary pain.
For those that workout to gain a lot of muscle mass and athletes of all sports, dynamic stretching is the more effective as a warm-up strategy while static stretching is far more effective post-workout as a cool down.
When you find yourself sore and tight from a previous training session, having difficulty to move efficiently while performing small tasks like bending over to tying your shoes because of tight muscles, you know that you’re not stretching properly after your workouts.
© Copyright – Hector Sectzer
