Stretching can improve range of motion, increase blood flow to muscles, and potentially reduce muscle pain. It may also help older people maintain mobility and aid in healing injuries. While stretching may not prevent all injuries, it can be beneficial for sports that require flexibility and can provide stress relief and pain relief benefits.
According to most experts, the main benefits of stretching are a greater range of motion and better blood flow to the muscles. Some experts also suggest that stretching helps prevent muscle injury, but research has cast doubt on this claim, at least for certain types of activities. Stretching may also have the potential to reduce muscle pain, and some people use stretching as a way to calm their nerves or relax their bodies.
Improving range of motion is one of the best-known benefits of stretching. As people age, they often gradually lose their ability to fully move their joints. Stretching can help fight this tendency, and can potentially help older people maintain their mobility.
Improving range of motion can also be especially important for people who have suffered some type of injury. After being injured, people may have to spend a long period of time without moving, which can cause their muscles to atrophy or become tight. Healing these injuries by getting blood to the muscles while improving range of motion can be one of the most important benefits of stretching.
Athletes have often used stretching regimens as a way to make their muscles more flexible. Some training programs were developed around the idea that stretching would reduce the amount of stretched muscles, which is a very common injury in many sports activities. Research studies have generally shown that there is no difference in injury levels between athletes who do not stretch compared to those who do. Many experts suggest this is because most sports don’t require extreme range of motion to perform basic movements, and pulled muscles occur more often from sudden movements than from movements beyond a certain range.
Some experts say that an improved range of motion might be more important to avoid injury in certain sports that require a lot of flexibility. Examples would include things like martial arts, where high kicks could lead to injury if the individual is not flexible enough. Stretching can also potentially relax a person’s muscles, and for this reason, stress relief is considered by some people to be one of the most useful benefits of stretching. Decreasing muscle tension may also have pain relief benefits, especially for certain disorders. Stretching is a very common method of dealing with back pain, for example, and while its effectiveness in this area is unproven, many people swear by it.
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