Pre-Play Stretching Not a Problem

To stretch or not to stretch, that is (always) the question it seems. 

Recently, some folks have said that stretching before you play your sport actually is detrimental not helpful.  Seems some studies indicated that pre-performance stretching reduces an athlete’s ability to do power moves – leaping for an overhead or sprinting to first base, for instance. Nah, it doesn’t seem to be so – unless you hold the stretch for longer than 60 seconds, in which case you probably aren’t hot to play anyhow.

That’s the conclusion of research about to be published in the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.  The research studied more than 100 previous studies of the subject. 

You have to wonder about the validity of stretching research, though.  To find the 100 research projects that had usable findings, the researchers culled from more than 4500 possible articles.