To Stretch or Not to Stretch?
I was helping coach a high school cross country team a few years ago, and I was always annoyed out how much time the head coach seemingly wasted in stretching. When I ran cross country and track competitively in high school and in college, my coaches always taught me that running made for faster runners and that stretching just made you prone to injury. But many runners and coaches feel the opposite – that stretching helps prevent injury. To help answer the question, to stretch or not to stretch, USA Track and Field sponsored a clinical trial of 3,000 runners. Their findings? There is no difference in the risk of injury for those who stretched before running and those who did not.
The study randomly followed runners for three months. One group had to perform a specified pre-run stretching routine while the other group was told not to stretch. It seems that both groups had the same risk of injury (16%). Overall, stretching did not provide protection against injury.
The study manager, Alan Roth, Ph.D., said, “For the study’s specified pre-run stretching routine that millions of runners commonly use, the study puts to rest claims for and against it, but the devil is in the details. Using a scientific method, we have arrived at some overall conclusions and learned some important details. If you’ve been doing pre-run stretching, it is best to keep doing it. A surprise finding was that many variables that we thought would strongly influence injury rates, didn’t. For example, injury rates among women and men were similar while mileage, flexibility or level of competition also did not appear relevant. In general, younger runners fared no better than the older runners.”
The study’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Daniel Pereles, a Maryland-based orthopedist, said that participants provided information on many “relevant variables” when they enrolled in the study, permitting a thorough analysis of potential risk factors for injury. Participants provided information on such things as age, gender, usual stretching regimen, miles run per week, years running, warm-up activities, measurements of flexibility, concurrent diseases and medications, level of competition and so on.
Two of the variables recorded were found to strongly influence injury rates; people with a higher body-mass-index were more likely to be injured as were people with a recent or chronic injury prior to participating in the study. Participation was limited to runners who had no injuries for the six weeks prior to the study.
One additional risk factor was identified for people who said they normally stretch before they run. If they were assigned to stretch, they had a low risk of injury, but if they were assigned not to stretch, the injury risk was double those who kept stretching.
Darby Thompson, the study statistician, commented, “With the number of runners who contributed to this study, we have shown that the difference in injury rates between those performing pre-run stretching and those who did not is negligible. Although we identified other very important risk factors (weight, prior injury, stopping a stretching routine), because this study was specifically investigating the effect of pre-run stretching, other risk factors may influence injury rates but were not identified. More studies like this one should be conducted to confirm or refute the importance of other risk factors.”
Happy trails!
Derek