Stiff, achy muscles is a common complaint among runners. Whether it’s your hamstrings, calves, shoulders, hips, thighs or back, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about. So you do what we all do these days: you do an online search and find all manner of stretches that promise almost instant relief. But how effective are these stretches, and should we include them in our warm ups to avoid getting stiff muscles in the first place?

Stretching is one of those things that has been hotly debated for quite a few years now, and to be honest, the available research is inconclusive about the benefits that stretching promises to deliver. Having said that, there is overwhelming agreement that static stretching as part of a warm up can reduce your running performance. Further to this, here are some words from Eyal Ledermen in his book Therapeutic Stretching, Churchill Livingstone Elsevier, 2014, referring to stretching as part of a warm up before and after exercise: 

Wow, that’s some statement and you may be thinking “what the heck do I do with that? Do I just not do a warm up any more?”. Firstly, let’s keep our focus on stretching. An effective warm up should never have been just about stretching anyway, so removing the stretching part of it does not mean removing the warm up completely. See this short article to discover why a warm up is important and what it is aiming to do.

Secondly, all we’ve done here is basically said that stretching isn’t very effective and isn’t a necessary part of a pre and post workout routine. By the way, Lederman isn’t the only expert to say this. Jay Dicharry, MPT, SCS, who is recognised as an authority in biomechanics, says something very similar in his books, and there are plenty of other specialists in this field that agree. But what about stretching in a wider context? What about using stretching to recover your range of movement (ROM) from your stiff muscles?

Fixing The Wrong Thing

Here is where it all goes a bit murky, and we need to look at the different types of stretching, what our goals are, and what the underlying cause of our stiff muscles or restricted ROM is. Too often we attempt to fix the output or outcome rather than the source of the issue. For example, restricted ROM around your hip is an output. Is the cause stiff hip flexors, glutes, quads etc? No, because they are also outputs. It is true that the stiff muscles are likely to be holding a restricted ROM, but what’s causing the stiff muscles in the first place?

Also, attempting to stretch a stiff muscle is more often than not, the complete opposite of what you actually want to do. If the muscle is already stiff, attempting to stretch it may trigger more contraction and more stiffness. Stiffness (a partial contraction) is a protection mechanism from the underlying nervous system, so trying to pull apart a protected muscle by stretching it is just plain daft. What then are you supposed to do?

The easy answer is to find out why your nervous system is holding the stiffness in place. Have you overworked the muscle and your system wants you to stop using it until it’s recovered? Does your system feel unsafe when you use that muscle, perhaps because you have faulty mechanics and can’t use it properly and are prone to injury? Do you have stability issues that are causing your system to stiffen up certain areas in order to create compensatory stability? Do you have sensory mismatching or miscommunication across different areas of your nervous system?

A good example of this sensory mismatch leading to muscle stiffness is a difference in signals coming from your visual system and your internal balance system (vestibular). If your brain is receiving different information from each and it can’t match it up correctly, it will stiffen your neck to keep your head still to avoid you falling over, feeling sick and other motion/balance-related issues. Simply trying to stretch your neck out won’t help. It may feel good at the time, but until you address the underlying sensory mismatch, that stiffness will come right back.

Thinking It Through

This same type of thing is happening all over your body. So the next time you think that stretching out stiff muscles is the only way to get relief, just ponder a bit longer. What may be causing the stiffness in the first place, and how can you address that issue? Of course, stretching can feel great and it does have a “mapping” effect where it helps your brain to identify where parts of your body are, so I would never say don’t stretch. It’s more about being aware that stretching probably isn’t doing what you think it’s doing, and there are far more effective ways to reduce muscle stiffness, regain ROM and improve performance.

The post Should You Stretch? appeared first on RunTeach.

“Of course I do”, “No, but I know I should”, “I do some stretches”, “I don’t really know what I’m doing”, “I’ve never done one and I’ve always been fine”. A selection of answers from runners when I ask them if they do a warm up. How about you, do you do a warm up?

The real question, I guess,  is “Should I bother with a warm up at all?”, and the follow up questions are “if yes, why and what should it be?”. These are all excellent questions.

Let’s start by stating that the purpose of a warm up is simple: To prepare you for what’s coming next. To that end, a warm up is most certainly necessary – or is it? Well yes it is, but maybe we need to look at your existing readiness before you go for your run before we start prescribing all manner of drills and stretches.

• Have you spent all day seated without moving much? Are you expecting your body to go through the loading and range of movements that your run demands  without any warning or preparation? In this scenario, preparing your mind, body and nervous system for your run is the sensible thing to do to help reduce your injury risk and improve performance.

• However, perhaps you’ve spent the last hour walking your dog and you are now going to go for a 5k or 10k easy run. In this case, you probably don’t need to do much of a warm up if any warm up at all. But if you were going to do a sprint session, you would likely want to do some sprint-specific prep before hoofing it out of the blocks or down the road or trail.

Prepare For What’s About To Come

The point is, you need to look at what you are about to do and the demands the session is about to place on your mind, body and nervous system, and you need to look at your readiness for this to happen. You also need to know your own body and how it reacts to certain running sessions as well as your usual risk of injury – i.e. are you injury prone, often have stiffness and soreness, or are  lacking in performance?

Other factors to think about are your running goals. If you are improving your technique and correcting movement and motor control challenges, the warm up is an excellent time to get some specific pre-run drills in. Do you need to work on improving elasticity and/or breathing? Again, the warm up can be used to get some of these exercises in as well.

So back to the original question: “Should I bother to warm up at all?”. The answer, of course, is “it depends”, and you can see from what we’ve already talked about above that in a lot of cases a warm up is an excellent opportunity to get ready for the run you are about to do. UK Athletics / England Athletics use an acronym called RAMP. This stands for:

Raise is all about getting your heart rate up to a level where your blood is delivering oxygen and nutrients to your working muscles. Warming your muscles up is also often quoted as part of Raise, but the reality is that it takes considerable time (20 minute tempo run) to actually get muscles such as the quads sufficiently warmed up for optimal elasticity. I tend not to mention the muscle warming element any more as I believe there are far more important aspects such as Activate, as this often also raises heart rate and temperature anyway.

Activate is all about firing up the working muscles. From a neurological perspective, this is waking up the pathways and the brain/muscle connection. It’s about sending messages back and forth, updating both your sensory and movement maps so your brain can accurately predict the necessary movement patterns you need during your session. These messages also help with accuracy and motor control, and in this sense you can reduce your injury risk. Activation can also help improve any underlying sensory and motor mismatches, depending on the activation exercises and drills you do. For me, this is a huge aspect of why we should warm up, in particular for performance related sessions and races.

Mobilise is as it sounds – helping to encourage mobility around a joint and in certain movement patterns. When combined with Activation, it is a great way to enhance fluidity which in turn can help running to feel easier and less like an effort.

Potentiate is an interesting one. This is about finishing your warm up at the level (heart rate, activation and mobilisation) that you intend to start your session at. Clearly this is very different if you are going for an easy 5k run compared to a 60 minute speed endurance or sprint session.

What Should A Warm Up Contain?

So now we’ve answered “Why?” and at least in part, “What should it be?”. As to the actual content of a warm up, well this will differ depending on what the run or session you are about to do is. As a base though, I always do some simple low feet skips with varying arm swings, making sure I place my feet in the way I want to when running. I tend to combine mobility and motor control drills, and add in any particular breathing or technique work that I’m working on at the time. I aim for my warm up to fire the muscles and move the joints in the way I want during my actual run.

If this sounds like it’s too much hard work, I can assure you that it’s not. My typical warm up for a speed session is less than 7 minutes, and only 3 to 5 minutes for other runs. If I consider myself already prepared for my easy run, then I may only do some short breathing or nerve gliding drills that take less than a minute. This is another advantage of doing mobility and activation exercises throughout the day – you are already always preparing yourself to go for a run. I usually do quite a lot of movement control, mobility and fluidity work during the day, so my warm ups can be very specific to my sessions and can be kept short.

What About Stretching?

“But what about stretching?” I hear you ask. Well, that’s another topic all on its own. To read a bit more about stretching and whether I think you should include it in your warm ups and post run routines, read this article here.

So there you have it. Preparation for your runs and sessions is highly recommended, but what form that takes really does depend on your readiness for that session. For most of us, some form of pre-run preparation is needed to make the most out of our running, but it need not be complicated or take a long time.

The post Why Warm Up? appeared first on RunTeach.