I know stretching may oftern seem time consuming and boring. But, adequate flexibility can improve your lifting performance and help reduce injuries. There are several different types of stretching techniques which work toward the common cause of preparing your muscles for activity and heavier work loads. Practicing more advanced techniques such as dynamic stretching can prepare you for specific athletic movements. For example, many sprinters use dynamic stretching techiniques to train their muscles to fire as quickly as possible. A good example of this technique for BBs would be performing walking lunges before engaging in a lunge with weight. If you would like pics with instruction for any specific stretching techniques let me know and I will post them.
Brief overview of techniques is found below:
Stretching Techniques*From Full-Body Flexibility by Jay Blahnik
STRETCHING TECHNIQUES
First we’ll review a few important stretching techniques and terms you should understand before you begin. Even if you’re very familiar with stretching, it’s a good idea to double-check your knowledge of this information. Believe it or not, even personal trainers and exercise specialists get confused and misuse these terms and their applications.
Assisted and Unassisted Stretching
Also known in the scientific world as
passive stretching, assisted stretching simply means that you’re using some sort of outside assistance to help you achieve a stretch. This assistance could be your body weight, a strap, leverage, or even gravity. With assisted stretching, you relax the muscle you’re trying to stretch and rely on the external force to hold you in place. Assisted stretching is the most common form of stretching because it’s easy to do and generally the most comfortable. You don’t usually have to work very hard to do an assisted stretch, but there’s always the risk that the external force will be stronger than you are flexible, which could cause an injury. You need to be mindful and aware of that, and you need to use good technique. Assisted stretches are most commonly used to increase flexibility. However, because you don’t have to use your own muscle strength to initiate the stretch, assisted stretching has come to be considered less helpful for improving movement in everyday life or in sport performance. In other words, you might improve your flexibility if you do only assisted stretching, but you might not improve your active range of motion for jumping, running, playing, walking, and reaching.
Unassisted stretching, also known as
active stretching, simply means that you’re stretching one muscle by actively contracting another one, usually the muscle in opposition to the one you’re stretching. With unassisted stretching, you don’t use assistance, leverage, or gravity to help you with the stretch. For example, squeezing your shoulder blades together and contracting your back muscles is an example of an unassisted chest stretch. Unassisted stretching is much less common and less popular than assisted stretching because it takes more effort and can be difficult to do. However, unassisted stretching has come to be considered very helpful for improving movement in everyday life and sport performance because it requires you to use and build your own strength while you improve your flexibility. Unassisted stretches can also be helpful in improving your posture because they often require you to work the muscles in your back and abdominals (known as your core or trunk power center). So, along with easing your everyday movements, incorporating unassisted stretching into your routine might provide bonus benefits.
Static and Dynamic Stretching
Whether you’re doing an assisted stretch or an unassisted stretch, you can choose to hold the stretch (static) or keep the stretch in motion (dynamic). When you do a stretch statically, you should generally hold the position somewhere between 10 and 30 seconds. When you stretch dynamically, you should move through the stretch 10 or 12 times. Although static stretching is more common, dynamic stretching has incredible benefits and has recently been associated with improved sport performance and enhanced everyday mobility.
One warning: Don’t confuse dynamic stretching with old-fashioned ballistic stretching (remember the bouncing toe touches from PE class?). Dynamic stretching is controlled, smooth, and deliberate. Ballistic stretching is jerky, uncontrolled, and erratic. Ballistic stretching can damage muscles and joints and should be avoided except under the supervision of a professional. For most people, the risks of ballistic stretching far outweigh the benefits.
The calf stretches on page 5 illustrate assisted, unassisted, static, and dynamic stretches.
There are lots of fancy techniques used in stretching (especially by coaches and athletes), such as PNF (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation) stretching or AI (active isolated) stretching. However, these techniques are still either assisted or unassisted stretches and are executed either statically or dynamically. The fancy variations are simply techniques used to speed up the process of achieving flexibility (often at some risk to the person doing the technique) or to enhance range of motion beyond the point required for most people. Don’t get me wrong—-I use many of these techniques with my clients and students as well, but most are too complex to do correctly without an instructor, trainer, or coach. And, at the end of the day, they are simply variations of one of these four stretching techniques.
http://www.humankinetics.com/product...xcerpt_id=3401
