If you are anything at all like the average person, you probably invest some time stretching, either just before or after exercise.
For many people, stretching after a workout is virtually essential. Throughout the years, stretching out has been accepted as a way to reduce your injury risk, enhance exercise performance, and alleviate muscle pain after exercise.
Stretching is used by so many people in the belief that it reduces the risk of strains and sprains, it’s rare to hear anyone query its importance. Nevertheless, irrespective of virtually worldwide acceptance, you will find almost no evidence to demonstrate that stretching before exercise has any influence on injury .
The notion that stretching eliminates lactic acid in muscles highlights 2 of the greatest fitness myths going. Specifically, that it is a “waste product” which causes muscle fatigue, and that it causes the soreness you feel in your muscles the day or 2 after a challenging training session.
The majority of people, even if they have entered a fitness center, have heard about lactic acid. It’s likely that you have been told that it builds up inside your muscles when you exercise, brings about that painful “burning” feeling, and ultimately makes your muscles give out.
The reality is, far from being a waste product, lactic acid is really a source of energy for your muscles. Actually, one reason that intense training helps you exercise harder and longer is that it makes your muscles better at making use of lactic acid.The concept lactic acid is detrimental is amongst the classic blunders in the history of science.
What about the concept that lactic acid brings about muscle soreness?
Lactic acid has absolutely nothing to do with delayed-onset muscle soreness. In fact, most of the lactic acid is gone from your muscles soon after exercise, whether or not you choose to do any stretching.
How come your muscles get sore a day or two after training?
A session of unaccustomed or unusually intensive exercise leads to inflammation – the same biological protection mechanism that causes the redness, swelling and pain if you cut a finger.
Inflammation is your human body’s reaction to damage so helping to begin the process of restoration and recovery. And one of the stages in this process is an surge in the production of immune cells, which reach a high 24-48 hours after exercise.
These cells then generate chemical substances that make pain receptors inside your body – which are responsible for the transmission of dull, aching pain signals – more sensitive.
The outcome?
Any time you move, these pain receptors are stimulated. Because they’re far more sensitive to pain than normal, you wind up feeling sore.
On a related note, I ought to also mention that post-exercise stretching doesn’t seem to have much of an effect where muscle soreness is concerned.
When a number of New Zealand scientists evaluated several muscle soreness studies, they learned that stretching after exercise resulted in an average decline in post-exercise soreness of just two percent – an effect that’s likely to be of “no practical significance” for most people.
Obviously, this doesn’t suggest that you shouldn’t perform any stretching after a workout. But if you’re only doing so because you have been told that stretching removes lactic acid in muscles, or that it’s likely to reduce muscle soreness, there is very little research to demonstrate that it can make any kind of real difference.