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Static stretching before or during exercise is at best a waste of time and at worse could increase your chance of injury and reduce performance.
You will never see professional sports men and women statically stretching before they start competing. Instead you will see them do a number of highly repetitive large amplitude movements of their legs, arms and bodies – this is dynamic stretching.
Static stretching raises the threshold at which the muscle contracts making it slower to react to your brains request for it to work. This results in a delay in the contraction of the muscle leading to reduced performance and and an increased chance of injury. Research also shows that static stretching makes tendon problems (tendinitis or tendinopathies) worse long term, NOT better. The trouble is static stretching feels good short term so not doing it is counter-intuitive.
So please only do static stretching after exercise while the muscles are still warm and replace your pre-exercise stretching with a decent warm up or dynamic stretching.
Our videos section provides a library of static and dynamic stretches so please do check them out here.
All of our videos are completely free and help to give a visual hints and tips.
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