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Increase your fitness through stretching....yes, really!
When asked about the benefits of stretching, the average response might be something akin to "improved flexibility," "reduced risk of injury," and maybe even "reduced stress." While all of these benefits are potentially available through proper stretching, the lesser known benefit--that of improved fitness--can be a powerful motivator to include stretching in your exercise program.
How, you might ask, can stretching improve my fitness? To answer that question, let's review the process of toning the muscles. To increase muscle tone, you need to work that muscle to its point of fatigue, that is, the point at which you become too tired to continue the movement with proper form. If this fatigue is brought on within about 20 repetitions of a given movement, the body will experience tiny, microscopic tears in the muscle, which is a normal part of the toning stimulus. These tears must obviously be repaired, and it is this process of repair that produces an increase in lean muscle mass; the amino acids you obtain through dietary protein fill in the "cracks" created by fatiguing the muscle. This leads to an increase in lean muscle mass. And so the cycle continues: muscle fatigue, muscle-building.
Where does stretching fit in with this? Actually, there are two ways: first, when you work a muscle, you're muscle is contracting, or shortening in length. This constant contraction can leave a muscle tight, short, and inflexible. This is why many athletes have such a hard time performing even the simplest stretches; their well-conditioned muscles have never received a counterbalance to their intense training routine. Stretching that muscle after working it will not only help keep the muscle from tightening; it can play a role in reducing the risk of delayed-onset muscle soreness--that classic stiffness we've all experienced the day after a tough workout. This helps speed your muscle's recovery from vigorous exercise, which means you can keep your workouts moving forward, rather than slowing down to accommodate soreness.
The second fitness benefit to stretching is that it helps improve your functional range of motion. In other words, you can move a particular joint through a greater distance. With any exercise, the greater distance a muscle contracts from the starting point to finishing point of a movement, the more muscle fibers must be recruited to perform that same movement. To put it in laymen's terms, the muscle must work harder, which means it will also fatigue faster. This translates to faster results, and greater increases of strength for the exact same exercise!
The same can be said for aerobic exercise; if your muscles are more flexible, your movements are "bigger"; your walking strides might be longer, your knees lifts might be higher, or your swimming strokes might be fuller. This can dramatically increase your overall energy output (as in, more calories burned!) over a given length of time. In other words, you get more bang out of your aerobic buck!
So the next time you're tempted to sideline your stretching routine, or breeze through it in record time, remember....you may just be missing out on your most powerful fitness weapon! -ep
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