This is Ask Coach Parry. Today's question comes from Sume. Sume wanted to know how often should you stretch during your training and how often should you be using a foam roller?

Brad Brown: This is Ask Coach Parry. Today's question comes from Sume. Sume wanted to know how often should you stretch during your training and how often should you be using a foam roller?

Lindsey: Stretching seems to be one of those topics which is continuously under debate. We have I think settled now on the fact that stretching is not that crucial in preventing injury.

It really depends on how flexible and inflexible we are, and it depends on more on imbalances between left and right, and your quads-hamstrings, hip flexors-hamstrings, hip flexors-glutes, that tend to cause a problem.

At the moment the accepted advice is really that we should look to stretch after our training sessions, not before. We shouldn't stretch a cold muscle, we only stretch after exercise. So if you are on a rest day I wouldn't really do a specific stretch session.

If you stretch after most of your runs, the areas that you should be focusing are hamstrings, glutes, hip flexors and quads. You can do a couple of others to, but those are really the four muscles that you should be focusing on stretching afterwards.

Foam roller is really good. It is quite a superficial massage rather than a nice deep tissue massage, so you can use it every day to be honest. But if you use it every two to three days that would be enough.

But if you find massage as a very helpful form of recovery and helping you to maintain yourself injury free, I would still look to having a proper massage with a massage therapist at least once every two weeks.

But the foam roller does certainly help and it helps to maintain that flexibility as well. You could do it every day, every two to three days is ok.