Why do we need to stretch our muscles? In the wild we wouldn’t have time to stretch before running from danger so shouldn’t our bodies be ready to move optimally whenever needed?
In: Biology
Just adding to address the part of the question ‘we wouldn’t have time to stretch before running from danger’.
We have the fight or flight response to deal with these situations. These days it’s more of a redundant response, but originally the fight or flight response was designed to help humans deal with danger from predators etc.
When the Fight/Flight response is triggered:
1. Pupils dilate to let more light into the eye and enhance vision.
2. Heart rate and breathing rate increases, to prepare the body for the physical exertion of fighting or fleeing danger, by increasing blood flow and oxygen levels.
3. Blood is diverted away from the skin surface and towards the brain and muscles (often making us pale, or alternating between flushed and pale) to prepare for physically escaping danger and fast thinking.
4. Muscles become tense as they prime for action, which results in shaking/trembling.
These are mostly things that warming up prior to exercise will also achieve. The fight or flight response is a cheat code that enables us to replace a chill 10-minute warm-up with a split second magic trick that primes us for life-saving physical exertion, with some added bonuses that help us to see more clearly and think faster (if you’ve ever been involved in an incident where everything happened really fast, but in your mind, it seemed like time slowed down, this is because of the effect of fight or flight response on the brain, time didn’t slow down, your brain sped up and you were able to take in and process far more information than normal). Warming up is like manually activating the fight or flight response, it prepares the body for physical exertion, it just doesn’t come with the super brain-enhancing goodness.
As others have pointed out, stretching, or at least static stretching like many of us older folk were taught to do in PE classes, is not recommended before, only after exercise. Preparation for exercise requires us to increase our blood flow and oxygen levels, so that oxygenated blood is flowing through all our muscles, waking them up. Our bodies are super-efficient, so when we are not using muscles, we only send the muscle the minimum supplies it needs and send the resources elsewhere to do more important things, which is why some heart rate increasing exercise and dynamic stretching helps before exercise – it wakes up those muscles and gets the blood flowing to them efficiently before use.
Static stretching – stretching to the max range of motion and holding for a period of time, helps us increase flexibility/range of motion and in the long term may help keep our muscles and joints healthier. Because you are stretching muscles to the limit of their range of motion, static stretches should only be done when the body is fully warmed up and the muscles have been engaged. Don’t do static stretches when you are cold – you will likely do more harm than good and you certainly won’t get any benefit as you won’t be able to extend to your full range of motion when the muscle is cold. Static stretching isn’t a necessary part of a work out unless you’d like to maintain or increase your muscles range of motion. (For example, when I did dance, I did static stretches to work on things like the splits. When I did weightlifting, I did a lot of static stretching that worked on hip, knee and ankle mobility to increase the depth/stability of my squats).
Dynamic stretching – using your muscles within their normal range of motion repeatedly. Walking lunges, jumping jacks, burpees, walking, jogging, skipping, rowing etc. Building intensity up, getting the muscles moving gently, pushing blood and oxygen around the body. Helps to prepare and equip the muscles for exertion. Warming up and down using aerobic activity and dynamic stretching is a 100% necessary part of a work-out, this is what helps to prevent/reduce injury, as well as having other benefits such as increasing performance and stamina.
If you try to bend a plastic ruler as far as it will go it will usually snap, this is like static stretching a cold muscle.
But if you do lots of smaller bends first, the plastic warms up, becomes more pliable and you’ll be able to bend the ruler further without snapping it. This is like dynamic stretching.
I guess aerobic warm-ups would be like heating the plastic ruler gently with a hairdryer before trying to bend it at all and fight or flight would be like adding a chemical to the plastic that temporarily makes it more flexible without any preparation.
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