Part One
Why Do You Need To Stretch
I’m asked almost daily about the subject of stretching, because I’ve been seen performing them before doing a bodybuilding routine. That’s because I have been involved in Martial Arts for over 50 years and know it’s value in helping my improve my bodybuilding over the last 40yrs.
My particular Martial Art is Wado Ryu Karate which requires the practitioner to have flexible joints and muscles. So I feel that I’m in the unique position, with a special perspective to talk about this subject. and what I’ve discovered over the years which as helped me in my bodybuilding quest.
Is Your Muscle Flexibility Program Safe and Effective
First, providing your program is safe and effective, flexibility training programs can significantly increase your physical performance. That’s because a flexible joint will be able to move through a much greater degree of motion allowing you to reach a grater degree of stretch effecting more muscle fibres.
What Other Benefits Does Stretching Provide
Also, and more importantly, it will require less energy to perform a particular movement, and help decrease your risk of injury.
Flexibility is your friend, your joint’s ability to move through a full range of movements, is important tool to muscle development. Flexibility training or stretching, can help you with your gym training and in some unexpected ways.
For example, during training your muscles store large amounts of waste materials that can delay or even prevent, muscles from recovering or slowing down or preventing muscle growth. Gently stretching your muscles will help the waste materials to dissipate quickly.
Stretching also helps to maintain balance between muscle groups that might be overused during exercise or physical activity… leading to bad posture. It’s important to clearly understand the many benefits that result from a good flexibility program… Let’s take a quick look.
Stretching will help to decrease resistance in the muscle tissue structures, which is built up when training. Therefore, you are less likely to become injured by exceeding tissue extensibility, the maximum range of tissues during activity.
Stretching, Bodybuilding, And The Martial Arts
Believe it or not but Martial Arts and bodybuilding go hand-in-hand. You see, in the Martial Arts we use stretching to become more flexible, so when doing high kicks, for example, your muscles aren’t working like an elastic band, reducing maximum movement and becoming torn in the process.
Now stretch your mind just a little bit more because this same process is happening during your training, the opposite muscle to the one you are training is indeed being stretched during the positive part of the movement… squats pulls on the hamstrings and glut muscles, for example.
Static stretching definitely help to reduce muscle soreness after exercise, especially when using stretching as a warm-down. Muscle soreness can be very stressing so reducing the lactic acid build-up is a definite benefit to any trainer, it really dose help the recovery process.
And least but not last, let’s not forget the tendons because they are also put under tremendous stress during training. The tendons don’t have much blood in them and if you don’t stretch to get them warm and full of blood, then you may end up damaging them, costing you more time out of the gym recovering.
See you in “Part Two”