Hardcore Stretching, Part I
Hardcore Stretching 101
by Mike Robertson


If you aren't making stretching an emphasis in your training right
now, you'll probably have an injury some day that could have easily
been prevented. I know, no one likes to hear that.
I'll bet even the word "stretching" in the title of this article
scared off a few people. Too bad for them, because hardcore
training needs to incorporate hardcore stretching. In this article,
I'll tell you how to do it!


The Two Questions
There are two questions I ask people to get an idea of their
feelings on stretching. If they aren't stretching I ask, "Why aren't you stretching?" If they're already stretching I ask,
"Why are you stretching?" This may sound confusing at first,
but read on and you'll see the method to my madness.

1. Why aren't you
stretching?
Do you not have the time? Do you not have the inclination? Have
you been completely injury-free for quite some time now? Do you see
any benefit to stretching whatsoever?
What we're getting at here is how you value stretching.
If you've never stretched and never had an injury, then you might
not see a need for adding stretching into your program.
On the flip side, what if you havehad an injury? What if
you had to take significant time off from the gym? What if you've
had tons of nagging little injuries along the way? Would you be
more interested in improving flexibility then? I'd hope so, and
this article may be crucial in keeping you healthy and injury-free
in the future.


2. Why are you
stretching?
This may sound like a weird question to ask, but again, the idea
is to establish the goals of your training. Quite often, a lifter's
program and his goals are on opposite ends of the spectrum.
For instance, consider someone who wants to get cut but spends
most of her gym time watching Oprah while stomping away on the
Stairmaster; her goals and her training program simply aren't
in-line with each other.
A flexibility example might be someone who wants to
significantly improve her current ROM (range of motion), but weight
trains heavily four times a week while only spending 15 minutes
twice a week to improve flexibility. It's good that she sees the
value of stretching, but her program isn't in-line with her
goals!
Sometimes, I have to put it into a different perspective for
people. Let's say that on average you train legs two times per
week. Over the course of those two workouts, the exercises that hit
your quads look like this:

Tuesday, Quad Dominant Workout

Squats: 4 sets of 8-10 reps, 201 Time Under Tension (TUT)
(92-120 seconds of work)

Lunges: 3 sets of 8 reps each, 101 TUT (48 seconds of work each
leg)

Friday, Hip Dominant Workout

Step-ups: 4 sets of 6 to 8 reps, 101 TUT (48-64 seconds of work
each leg)
If you add all that up, that turns into 188 to 232 total seconds
of strength work for the quads. It doesn't look like much on paper,
but now compare that to how long you spend stretching. A general
flexibility program calls for two sets of 20 seconds per body part.
Even if we follow that recommendation three times per week,
that's only 120 seconds of stretching compared to the 188 to 232
total seconds of strength work you're doing! In my eyes, that's not
even enough stretching volume to maintain your current
flexibility level, let alone improve it!
The example above is somewhat assumptive, but hopefully it gives
you an idea of just how much stretching is really needed to keep
pace with your strength work. Keep in mind that a lot of other
factors come into play with regards to maintaining or improving
flexibility. These would include the intensity level of your
stretching and strength work, your current level of
strength/flexibility, injury history, flexibility goals,
etc.



The Three Levels
In my experience, there are basically three levels of people who
stretch:

Level One: People who are stretching because someone told them
they need to, or they feel they need to.
Trainees in this group typically go through a few stretches each
day, with no real rhyme or reason to their stretching. At some
point, they picked up the habit or someone told them they needed to
stretch more than they were.
This is better than no stretching at all, but they probably
aren't seeing a whole lot of progress. As well, their time could be
much better served with a few adjustments to their
program.

Level Two: People who stretch for injury prevention purposes and
flexibility maintenance.
Most people reading this probably fall into this category. They
aren't necessarily stretching to improve flexibility per se, but
they do value the role of stretching in their programs.
Here's the kicker, though: Most people really need to improve flexibility before they focus on maintaining it!
This is like trying to maintain a 300 pound bench when you can
only bench 250. You can't maintain something you don't have enough
of in the first place! The majority of Muscle With
Attitudereaders probably need a little, if not a lot, of
improvement in their flexibility before they move on to a
maintenance program.

Level Three: People who are actively seeking to improve their
flexibility.
Believe it or not, there are some true masochists out there who
have a specific goal of improving flexibility. I'm not trying to
turn you into a yoga instructor, but by improving your flexibility
you can greatly improve your performance in the gym and speed
recovery out of it.


Your cat knows what's good for her!


Four Reasons to Stretch
Let's move on to the part where I try to convince you that you
need to stretch (or more importantly, improveflexibility).
I'm not trying to bore you with rationale, but I think you should
at least consider some of the benefits to adding static stretching
into your program:

Reason One: Improve flexibility imbalances
between sides.
I know what some of you are thinking, "Human beings aren't
perfect, so why bother?" Just because we aren't perfect doesn't
mean we can't strive to improve our current physical state. After
all, we don't get up in the morning and think, "Gee, my body isn't
perfect, so I don't think I'm going to hit the gym today."
Just as we should be working to achieve a balance in strength
from side-to-side, we should also be focusing to achieve balance in
flexibility as well. Flexibility imbalances between sides will
typically manifest into bigger problems down the
line.
Take someone whose left hip musculature is tighter than her
right. Since her left side is tighter, the hips will typically
deviate toward the right side on movements like squats and
deadlifts. This will put more stress and torque around her right
hip joint (or knee, low back, etc.), which will eventually lead to
overuse or injury.
We can add single-leg strength work to improve balance between
sides, but we also need to address the tension/flexibility issues
in the left hip if we're going to increase our lifts and decrease
our susceptibility to injury.
Here's where most people go wrong with flexibility imbalances:
they train each side with identical set and rep schemes because
they don't want to be "imbalanced!" I'm sorry, but this is totally
asinine. If you train in a balanced fashion but are imbalanced
to begin with, you'll be more flexible, but you'll still be
imbalanced!
For that reason, you need to increase the time stretched,
frequency, and intensity on the tighter side until it catches up to
the good side. This may take a while, but will be worth it when
you're training injury-free and making amazing gains all at the
same time.