Time To Stretch

A couple of days ago I was training a football player that had trained with me before, but he had been working out on his own for awhile and I hadn't seen him for quite some time. He is 6'5" about 250 and used to run a 4.75 sec forty yard dash. For the past 4 months he has been doing nothing but lifting heavy weights. His program is based off the bench, squat and power clean like most other football strength programs, and he put on a good amount of muscle with some serious strength gains as well. Needless to say is was working hard and it paid off bug time.

Now it came time to retest his numbers. He gained muscle mass, his squat went up, power clean went up, bench, way up! His forty yard dash, well, he got a 5.25 and it looked like he was made out of concrete. I could dig up a corpse that had more muscle ROM (range of motion) than he did. After asking him whether he had done any dynamic stretching, warm-up, speed work or static stretching with his weightlifting he said, "No I just wanted to get strong!" Well did you want to get so slow you left a snail trail behind you when you run also?!

There is a lesson here that if this athlete does not learn very quick (trust me I'll be the one to teach him) will lead to some serious muscle injury. Increased muscle stimulus leads to increased muscle stiffness, unless proper maintenance stretching is performed. Without proper stretching (dynamic and static) it can not continue to operate at high performance because of the active stiffness. Static stretching will help with muscle length, and dynamic stretching will help with muscle stiffness and active ROM.

If this athlete was performing dynamic and static stretching throughout his weight training program he would have maintained a flexible, powerful, high performance body. Instead, he is tight, slow, and seriously injury prone.

This lesson applies to the non-athlete as well. You want to maintain a healthy, functional body that operates like a well tuned Corvette right? Then you must make sure that you are giving it the maintenance that it requires, which means keeping the muscles at full length and making sure they have a good amount of ROM. Otherwise, it won't take a forty yard dash to tell that you are in bad shape. It will be evident by your hunch back posture, your cane that you walk with because of your bum knees, and the thousands of dollars spent on low back surgery.