New to running and yet to find your stretching groove yet? Stretching can form a very important tool to your running; provided you know what you are doing? So how should one be doing it? When should one be doing it? And what muscles are important to stretch? Hear more from Lindsey on this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast.

Transcript

Welcome onto this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’m Brad Brown. A fantastic online seminar last night. Lindsey, thank you very much for your time, it was brilliant. I think the runners got a ton out of it, not long to go now. Some pearls of wisdom handed out and dished out last night, it was superb.

Lindsey Parry: Look, again, lots of nerves, but really great to interact with the runners, knowing that the race is literally knocking on our door and around the corner. Hopefully I managed to settle a little bit of nerves without making the people too relaxed. Because we do want to be a bit scared going into Comrades. Because a bit of fear gives us that respect that we need in the first half of the race.

BB: Absolutely! Lindsey, interesting question that’s funnily enough not Comrades related, as we get close to Comrades race day. It’s from a newbie runner and they’re saying; they know a lot has been spoken and written about the subject. But they want to know, what is the best time to stretch around running? Is it before the run, after the run and what stretches are best and why?

Stretching before doesn’t seem to benefit

LP: That’s right, there’s a lot written. There’s a lot in the literature about it. So there is a little bit of trial and error and finding out what works best for you as an individual. In my personal opinion, in my experience, both with my athletes and with myself as a subject, I have found that stretching before exercise is uncomfortable, for a start. Secondly, it doesn’t really help me feel any better for the exercise bout which I’m about to embark on.

The stretching afterwards feels much better. If I don’t do it, in other words, if I’m lazy and I hit a busy week and I’m finishing my running and jumping in a car. Then I definitely feel a tightening up of all my muscles. It actually starts to affect the way that I run.

I’m a big believer in stretching post-exercise. Both static and dynamic stretches are good for me. But on the dynamic stretches, leg swings and those type of things; you just need to be careful that you don’t go through too large a range of motion too quickly. Because you also don’t want to injure your legs.

I’m very happy with static stretches. I focus on the hip flexes, I focus on the glutes, focus on the hamstrings and I focus a little bit on the calves. But the other three are really my main ones, and the quads. Those four main ones are the quad, glute, hip flexor, hamstring and then I do a little bit of calf stretching. Again, you’ll also get to know your body and know which muscles tend to tense up the most and then become uncomfortable in later exercise sessions.

Get less injuries – practice long-term stretching

As a closing point to make, there was some really cool research done on the military a couple of years ago. Where they had two groups of soldiers. Those that stretched before exercise and those that stretched after exercise. What they found was that there was very little difference in injury incidence at an actual event.

In other words, if I stretch before or if I don’t stretch before, it makes very little difference to those that get injured or don’t get injured. What they found is that the guys who stuck to the stretching programme over a long period of time, there was a definite decrease in injuries. If you maintain a reasonable level of flexibility.

BB: Awesome stuff, thank you very much for that Lindsey. Thanks for that question as well. Don’t forget, if you’d like to check out the Coach Parry online community, the website to get to is coachparry.com/join. There’s so much great information there, videos, as well as training programmes, go check it out, coachparry.com/join. Until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.