Almost every professional or amateur athlete have encountered with the word stretching. For most of the athletes the word stretching and its actual implementation is not very appealing. A large number of people who play sports do not pay enough attention to stretching and many of them consider it to be time-consuming and unnecessary. The truth is that stretching is one of the most important activities which the athlete should perform. However, stretching has its own rules and forms which are needed to be followed. We will discuss in the following paragraphs the importance of stretching.
Why is stretching important?
Stretching has several positive roles for an athlete. It is not only time-consuming of stretching your muscles which does not lead anywhere. One of its key tasks is to speed up the regenerative process in muscles, relieves the so-called soreness, with which not just one athlete had encountered after hard fitness training. Another advantage which stretching involves is that it calms the cardio – vascular load. Many athletes have shortened muscles especially on the feet, and here the stretching is very helpful, when we do stretching regularly we stretch the muscles and thus it prevents them from shortening.
Static stretching
Static stretching is one of the forms of stretching. It is a traditional approach used in which we reach the limit position of movement and then we remain there with the point of stretching the muscles and tendons of the segment. Studies show that such an approach can not only improve flexibility and to some extent the power, but also reduces the amount of cortisol. Decrease of cortisol levels is a positive feature of stretching because this hormone negatively affects the process of regeneration of muscle mass, its increase and it acts opposite as testosterone.
Dynamic stretching
Dynamic stretching is another form of implementation of stretching. This type of stretching should be performed before sport performance. Dynamic stretching consists of rapid movements. In this type of stretching we can include rapid circling of wrists, arms, legs excavations and other dynamic movements. It is always important to focus on those parts of the body which we will be used the most during our performance however; we shouldn’t underestimate any other parts of the body. Most studies have shown that proper dynamic stretching can increase sport performance of an athlete.
End of the first part
In the first part of stretching, we have briefly approached importance of stretching and why we shouldn’t skip it. We talked about the basis on which does the static and dynamic stretching works. In the second section, we will examine the other forms of stretching and you will also learn when and which form is the best to use.
