When should you stop stretching?
You should definitely not stretch when you have just overcome a muscle injury. In such a case, you should always seek help from a doctor or physiotherapist beforehand. Furthermore, you should not stretch your muscles if you have not warmed up sufficiently before.
If you start directly with various stretching exercises without a warm-up program, muscle and ligament injuries can occur. Basically, for all sports where fast movements take place, stretching immediately before the load is inappropriate and in the high performance area even reduces performance. Stretching immediately before and after strength training is also not recommended.
However, this only applies to advanced fitness sports and bodybuilding, as stretching is an additional stimulus for muscle building. If you do not want to do without the stretching exercises during your strength training, you should make sure that the stretching stimulus of the muscles is not too strong during muscle build-up. If you want to increase your performance by stretching exercises, you are also on the wrong track.
Stretching exercises reduce the performance of the muscles rather than producing a positive effect. Especially for sports with maximum power development, stretching is not recommended at all, especially during breaks in the exercise. Because in maximum strength sports the muscle is first maximally contracted and then maximally stretched during a stretching exercise.
This can result in serious injuries. Before a sporting effort, you should carry out a warm-up program, regardless of the type of sport, before stretching. Before an endurance run, for example, you should run loosely for a few minutes to warm up the muscles and prepare the body for the strain.
The warm-up phase can then be extended with some stretching exercises for the legs. Stretching exercises before the load should not take longer than ten minutes, otherwise the effect of warming up will be lost. When doing the different stretching exercises, you should only make sure that the stretching time does not last longer than eight seconds for the static exercises, otherwise the muscle will get tired and rapid contractions will be prevented.
There are no specific guidelines for stretching exercises for speed training. Similar to strength training, care is taken to ensure that static exercises are not performed for too long. In general, strength and speed training does not necessarily require a warm-up program to achieve the desired performance.
However, stretching exercises will not cause any health problems and the risk of injury can easily be reduced. Stretching exercises before sport are therefore not absolutely necessary, or are dependent on the type of sport. However, there is no health risk when doing stretching exercises.
Before strength and speed loads, stretching leads to a loss of performance, as the desired pre-tension of the muscles is missing. Static stretching before a football training session therefore makes no sense. Only the leg muscles should be stretched with dynamic exercises.