Stretching: Myth busted

"Most of us learned how to warm up in grade school , by touching our toes and slowly stretching our muscles, and haven’t changed our routines much since. Science, however , has moved on. In the past decade, a growing number of studies have shown that static stretching not only does not prepare muscles for activity; it almost certainly does the reverse. In a representative experiment conducted a few years ago at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did without stretching. Other studies have found that stretching before exercise decreases strength in the stretched muscle by as much as 30 percent.Weirdly , stretching the muscles in one leg can even reduce strength in the other leg, an effect that can last for up to 30 minutes. In a few key real -world studies, basketball players who stretched before a game were unable to jump as high during play as when they hadn’t stretched."