Interviewer: I want to welcome everyone to FitCon Expo. And we have a special guest, Brad Walker on the phone. Welcome Brad.
Brad: Thank you. It is definitely an honor and a pleasure to be here.
Interviewer: Glad you're here. Why don't you enlighten us with some stretching?
Brad: Don't mention it. First, I want to congratulate Ryan and Geo and everyone who put on the Fitcon Expo. Because it's an absolutely fantastic compilation of information and both the quality and quantity of the information is just incredible, which is fantastic. So what I want to do before I get into it. I'll go over some background about myself and how I got involved in the industry, and how I got interested in stretching and flexibility. And then we go to the presentation.
I have been in the fitness industry for a little over 20 years. I started running and cross-country skiing in high school and competitive swimming from a fairly young age. This led to triathlon, which I competed in for a while and even spent a few years as a full-time professional triathlete. During this time I was lucky enough to work with a very experienced swimming coach and he had a number of Olympic athletes on his team. I was always fascinated. And this was 20 years ago when there wasn't much emphasis on strength and conditioning. And I was always fascinated by how much strength and conditioning work he did with his athletes. And how much weight training and stretching and all sorts of other different things he used to compliment the swimmers. And that always intrigued me and made me interested in this field.
From there I went to university and studied Health Sciences in Sport and Exercise. When I left there I was lucky enough to get another job with another coach named Col Stewart. Col is the coach and father of World Triathlon Champion Miles Stewart. I had a great opportunity there to work with different athletes. One of the great things about working with Col was that his squad consisted of a wide variety of athletes. Obviously we had the triathletes and the runners and the swimmers and the cyclists. But we also worked with athletes like Mick Doohan, World Champion 500 CC Motorcycle Racer. We worked with world champion squash players, with world champion roller skaters. And we just had a hugely diverse set of athletes that we were working on. It was an honor to see those different athletes and not just look at the differences between the sports. But also look at the similarities between the athletes in the different sports. So that was a fantastic opportunity and I definitely learned a lot. And started getting more involved in this strength and conditioning and stretches and so forth.
One of the things that we started to see in the athletes that we worked with was an incidence of sports injuries. We started analyzing these athletes and looking at ways we couldn't just get over the injuries. But it also helps athletes to recover faster and, in the long term, to prevent them from getting those injuries. So we started experimenting with a lot of different techniques. One thing we found was that many of the athletes who had problems, who had sports injuries, had a massive lack of flexibility. Either specifically in a certain muscle group or just in general. We started experimenting with many different stretches and flexibility exercises to see if we could help those athletes. We have started using a whole range of different flexibility methods. And we started to see what kind of stretching worked in what conditions and we started to see great results in improving the flexibility of the athletes. So that led to other things and that's how my interest in stretching and flexibility started and everything just grew from there.
What I want to talk about briefly is the state of the stretch and flexibility industry right now. It's quite an exciting time for stretching and flexibility. I now look at stretching and flexibility as strength training was 20 years ago. We're more or less about to move forward. We've been going round in circles for a long time. We've been swinging back and forth between yes. Stretching is great, or no, you don't have to stretch anymore and we're starting to mature. Or a more balanced view of stretching and how to use stretching and so on. That's pretty exciting and I think over the next five and 10 years we're going to see tremendous progress in the way we use stretching. In how we apply stretching, to certain athletes, and so on. So it's quite an exciting time. I think we'll see tremendous progress in stretching and flexibility over the next five or 10 years.
What we're going to talk about in the next few minutes has caused a lot of confusion, not just among athletes and trainers. But also the general population and that's how you use stretching as part of the warm-up. For a long time there were a number of people who actually thought that stretching was outdated. And we no longer had to use stretching as part of the warm-up or as part of movement preparation for athletic performance and so forth. It's important that we look at this from a balanced, adult perspective. And see how to use stretching properly. And the right kinds of stretching and all that stuff, to maximize the benefits of our warm-up and so forth. For a long time we received a lot of comments from people saying that you no longer need to stretch before exercising. Fortunately, I can say that those comments have died down quite a bit over the past 12 months. That starts to say that people are starting to understand how they can use stretching more. We've been getting a lot of comments for quite some time, some of them quite aggressive at times, saying, “Aren't you aware of the latest research? It has been proven that stretching is no longer necessary. You no longer need to stretch before your workout. This is the confusion that has arisen in recent years. And what I want to do is look at where this belief or where this theory comes from.
A few years ago, I think about 2005, there were some studies done on stretching. Because it related to athletic performance and one of the most cited was a study on standing jump height or vertical jump height. There was also another one on Power Output for gymnasts and how stretching did or didn't help those athletes in that particular circumstance. What happened now was that people in those studies thought that stretching was no longer relevant or that we could do away with stretching altogether, which is definitely not the case. I'm sure many of you know Alan Cosgrave. He often says that we tend to overreact in the short term and underreact in the long term. And this was a classic example of that.
We had people looking at studies, who clearly didn't read them completely. But looking at studies and drawing conclusions about stretching that just weren't true. It's actually quite similar. I think I've talked about stretching and flexibility before, at the same level as strength training, say, 20 years ago. If someone has been in the industry that long, you probably remember 15, 20 years ago. There was a huge debate about whether we should do strength training or strength training in addition to athletic training. So the accepted theory was if you're a runner all you have to do is run and if you're a swimmer. Everything you need to swim and then people started using strength training. And there was a lot of debate about whether strength training did any good at all. Either strength training was a waste of time or strength training had no performance-enhancing benefits. The pendulum would swing the other way, where strength training is the be all and end all of athletic conditioning. And you can reduce your sport-specific training and simply do more weight training. For quite a few years we had this pendulum effect where weight training was bad. And the next month strength training was good and then we went back to strength training was bad.
Fortunately, over time we have come to a more balanced and mature view. And we now know that strength training is beneficial when used correctly. It's very similar to stretching and flexibility right now. We're just beginning to realize that stretching is indeed beneficial, but you have to know what you're doing. You need to know how to incorporate it, you need to know the different strains to incorporate and so on to get the maximum benefits. out. Fortunately, I think we are moving in the right direction. And what we're going to do is -- we're going to hopefully dispel some of those myths and misconceptions about stretching. And how to use it and why we use it and so on in the warm up.
So before we go any further, let's take a quick look at what some of the current research says. If you've got your handouts there, you'll notice that I've quoted one of the quotes from research done over the years. This was a review of the literature that had been released on stretching to this date and concluded that there was not enough research done and of the studies that have been done, they are not specific enough. They are too general in nature. I certainly agree with this quote, although as I've said before I think we're just getting started on the right track and we'll see great results over the next 5 or 10 years. So if some researches in the past didn't give us the answers we were looking for. What exactly is wrong with those studies? One of the things these early studies couldn't do was they couldn't differentiate between the different types of stretching. And when you use the different types of stretching. A lot of these studies, a lot of the early studies, have focused on improving performance through static stretching before exercise? And from a number of previous studies we know that in specific cases static stretching takes place just before strength training. Or explosive-type activities can be harmful.
To get good results, we need to ask the right questions. Thankfully, I think we're learning a lot and some great research will come out in the next 5 years. The other thing the study was trying to do or some of the studies were trying to do was prove whether stretching improved performance or reduced injury. In most cases, the studies took 3 or 4 very basic static stretches. They had one group do the stretches before their workout, the other group didn't do the stretches before their workout. In just about all of those cases, they found that doing static stretches just before their activity had no real effect on performance improvement or injury reduction. I more or less relate it to doing bicep curls before swimming and those kind of equivalents. While doing three static stretches for your legs before running won't necessarily make you run faster or reduce your injury, and so on. Just like doing a few sets of bicep curls won't help with swimming. But using stretching and strength exercises over a period of time will have a beneficial effect.
So either way, it's quite positive -- some of the studies that are currently being done. I'm currently talking to the US Athletics about a study they are doing on stretching and this is really just a preliminary study. It's like a basic research to get some information for future studies. So that will be quite exciting. I am confident that we will get very good results from it. There's a lot of other good studies starting to come out that we can really draw from and get some concrete evidence to move forward and so forth.
So let's look at the purpose of stretching during warm-up. Many people have the impression that stretching is the warm-up and that is certainly not the case. Stretching is only part of the warm-up. An important component, but on its own it is quite ineffective. That is why we should not separate stretching from the warm-up. It should be part of and incorporated into the warm-up and other warm-up activities to bring the mind and body to a physical peak, ready for athletic performance, and so on. In my opinion, just as I am a big fan of stretching and flexibility, I am well aware that stretching and flexibility are just one part of an overall strength and conditioning program. I'm certainly not proclaiming that stretching is the be all and end all of athletic performance. It is certainly not a panacea or magic pill that will make all your injuries disappear and make you perform better. But when used in conjunction with a number of other injury prevention and performance enhancing methods, your stretching is very, very effective.
I think it's important that we move more towards a holistic approach and more towards including stretching as part of our overall training program and not trying to separate it or make it a separate little thing that we try to do alongside it. So, before we move on to some more practical stuff, let's take a very quick look at the type of stretching that works best. This is where some of the first studies fell. That they failed to identify the right type of stretching for the activity and that this was one of the big stumbling blocks to the studies that actually produced positive results or results that we could take advantage of and work with.
So to summarize the different types of stretching, we can basically divide the stretching exercises into two groups. We have static stretches and we have dynamic stretches. Now static stretches are stretches that are performed without any movement. So a classic static stretch where the athlete gets into the stretch position, moves to where he feels tension in the muscle group and then holds that for a predetermined amount of time and these are static stretches. This is why they are called static because there is no movement. On the other hand, we have dynamic stretches and dynamic stretches are stretches, which are done with movement and they involve a slow or steady swing or movement of a particular body part to gradually lengthen the muscles and soft tissues around that area.
Within those two groups, there are a number of different types of stretching. Within static stretching there is active stretching, there is passive stretching, there is P and F; there's a whole bunch of different things. Within dynamic stretching you have things like ballistic stretching. You have things like active isolated stretching and dynamic stretching and so on. So within both categories you have a number of different types, but broadly speaking they can be all - grouped into one of two categories.
So it is important that we determine which type of stretching is most suitable for the goal we are trying to achieve. Just as there are different types of strength exercises that are suitable for different purposes, these different types of stretches are also suitable for different purposes. So it is important that we are able to identify the type of stretching that is most beneficial and include it in the program at the right time. Let's look at an example of a warm-up and review some of the elements or components of an effective warm-up. First, we look at what I like to call a general warm-up, where we simply prepare the body for more strenuous activities to come.
Movement Prep is a common term used these days not necessarily to replace the warm up but just to give a more general idea of what we're trying to achieve and Movement Prep is a pretty appropriate title to use because that is exactly what we try to do. We prepare the body for movement. We prepare the body for more activity and so on. Any light, general physical activity is good for this, simply anything that raises the heart rate, gets the blood flowing, raises muscle and core temperature, and so on. This is all part of the initial phase before we get into the other components of the warm-up.
The next part I'd like to add is static stretching and for a long time, here at the Stretching Institute, we've been taking quite a bit of flak from people for continuing to incorporate static stretching into our warmup because a lot of people thought that, these studies, you know, quote - not cited, proven you didn't have to do static stretching anymore. So luckily, you know, a lot of people are starting to recognize the benefits of static stretching and that it has benefits if it's used at the right time, with the right person, et cetera. Interestingly, I spoke with Mike Boyle a few months ago and he even published an article called "The Static Stretching Renascence".
In that article, he went into detail about how static stretching had been neglected and that the baby would be thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak, and that people had abandoned static stretching altogether. He went into detail about how he uses static stretching as part of his warm-up and as part of his move preparation, etc. and that using static stretching certainly has many benefits when used correctly.
So that's the next part of the warmup that I like to use. It helps to gradually lengthen the muscles and associated soft tissues you will be working with and is included in the general warm-up and static stretching. It has a great effect to really prepare the body for more aggressive or dynamic movements. and so on. The next thing we are going to include in the warm up is – is a sport specific warm up where we start by doing exercises or techniques that are specific to the specific sport the athlete is involved in. Gridiron player would start doing moves from one type to another, doing some cones, very short sprint type activities. And gradually build and build to, you know, where you would start with maybe 60% effort and you would build and build and build to the point where you just hit that max effort and so on. Finally, it's great to include some dynamic stretches that are specific to the individual requirements of the particular sport you're working with. These last two points here, that the sport-specific warm-up and the dynamic stretching, these can certainly be integrated together.
What I usually do, although I've broken them down into four specific parts, is what I tend to group the first two together is the general warm-up and static stretching together and then I group the next two parts of the sport-specific warm-up up and the dynamic stretching and this will prepare the athlete for maximum performance in his sport and so on. It'll really get them -- get them to the point where they're in prime shape to go out and play their game and play their sport and so forth.
This is certainly a guideline. I've added some time frames for these different components and often these time frames are a bit unrealistic. I put in 5 to 15 minutes here for the general warm-up and another 10 minutes for static stretching and 10 minutes for sport-specific stretching and a few minutes for dynamic stretching. Well, in a real world example, this is just not practical. Very few athletes today have half an hour to prepare for their training. No, maybe that's different when they're preparing for a final at a World Championship or Olympics in Oregon, but in general day-to-day training and for the general amateur athlete or the other person who just likes to get in a little bit of exercise, these guidelines are not always practical.
That's one of the reasons why I like to group the four components into two broader groups and obviously we can shorten those time frames from there. What I've been doing a lot lately is actually the sport specific warm up, the exercises and so on and the dynamic stretches are starting to incorporate into the body of the warm up or the body of the workout, sorry. What this usually does is - it tends to take the athlete through the warmup to their workout without them even noticing that they've transitioned from warmup to workout. What I discovered was that many athletes sort of dreaded the warm-up and cool-down. They actually saw it as something that took away their most important training. You had a lot of athletes, you know, who kind of came in late because they knew they were only going to warm up for the first 5 or 15 minutes, or they left early because they thought they didn't. It is not really necessary to cool down.
But by incorporating all of these warm-up components, by incorporating them all into the body of the workout, we're essentially taking the athlete from a cold state to a warm-up state and to a peak state for their workout in one smooth motion without the athlete finding out that they actually did a warm up and I find this works much better, with athletes, encouraging them more to do warm ups and stretches and so forth. By doing mostly dynamic stretching, we do a lot of dynamic stretching, during the main part of the workout, and so on, and it's had some really good positive effects.
Let's take a look or make a quick summary and look at some of the conclusions we can draw. I think people are now starting to realize that stretching is beneficial, just like strength training. But the most important factor is that it is used in the right way, at the right time, with the right type of stretches, and so on. It is important that we understand the different types of stretches available to us and how to integrate them into our workouts and so on. As with any other activity, there are certainly rules and guidelines to ensure they are safe and stretching is no exception. Stretching can be very dangerous if done inappropriately or if the wrong type of stretch is done with the wrong type of person or someone with an injury.
As you know push ups are a great exercise but if they are done with the wrong person, you know if they are done with someone who has a shoulder injury then there is definitely a chance of damage and injury and more. injury. We need to understand how to effectively integrate stretching. We need to be able to recognize the different types of stretching and so on and how each type benefits different situations and scenarios.
To conclude, I want to return to a point I made earlier about stretching being just one important part of helping to reduce injury and improve performance. As I said before, stretching is not a magic pill. Stretching on its own is very ineffective. It is only when stretching is used in conjunction with a number of other injury prevention techniques and a number of other performance enhancing techniques that the benefits of stretching and improved flexibility become apparent. I think it's important to look at stretching – I heard a trainer say that stretching is just one spoke in the fitness wheel and when you get all the spokes in the wheel, the wheel spins pretty well; but if you miss a spoke the wheel doesn't spin as well as it should and stretching is just one spoke in this fitness wheel and we need to be able to integrate it with all the other stuff all the other techniques and use it effectively as part of our athletic conditioning, and so forth.
Before we get to the questions, what I want to do is let you know that we have some resources. Some free resources available on our website. On our website we have quite a large archive of articles about stretching, flexibility and sports injuries. At the moment there are more than a hundred articles. All specific about stretching, flexibility in sports injuries, so it's a great resource for information on how to treat injuries, information on how to prevent injuries, how to integrate your stretching, et cetera, and that's on our website thestrechinginstitute.com, only that URL again: thestretchinstitute.com and another resource that we have there, which is also a free resource, we've -- over the years we've put together a six-part course on the basics of flexibility. We've put this course together to try and give people a basic or basic level of stretching and flexibility so they're able to go away and make decisions about how to build in stretching and how to do it safely and how to maximum benefits from it and so on. This is pretty basic information and I hope most personal trainers and sports coaches and so forth already know this kind of information, but the course is designed for -- not necessarily the personal trainers and sports coaches.
It's curated more for the people you work with so if you have athletes you work with or clients you work with you know encourage them to go there and take that course and it'll give them a real basic understanding of it use of stretching, and so on. We also have an hour long audio presentation I did about six months ago that goes into a lot more detail about using stretching. It goes into how to use the different techniques for maximum benefit and so on. It goes into some of the anatomy and physiology of stretching and so forth and both resources, the course and the audio are completely free and you can get them from stretchingsecretsrevealed.com and I'll spell that out for you. It's s, t, r, e, t, c, h, i, n, g, s, e, c, r, e, t, s, r, e, v, e, a, l, e, d .com and if you go there you will find all that information, completely free and of course, if you have any questions, we welcome them to our website: thestretchinginstitute.com. Just go there and ask all your questions. We're happy to answer any question you have for us and that actually brings us to our next point of questions. So if we have any questions, let's get into it.
Interviewer: Yes, Brad, two came in. One belongs to Todd from Kentucky. He wants to know, what would you do with someone who has a chronic hamstring sprain? It pops up every season and the guy is only in high school; so it's been going on for about seven years.
Brad: Yes, very common, very often, unfortunately too often and this actually stems from the fact that the injury has not healed properly. There are a number of parts that an athlete must go through to ensure that these types of muscle strains or soft tissue injuries are properly treated, because if not, and this is not just specific to hamstring injuries, then this is very common shoulder injuries and so on. What happens is the athlete just goes through this ongoing cycle of them thinking they're better and then they get injured again and then they work on rehab for a while. They think they are better and then they get injured again. If we don't fix this problem initially, this is the pattern that will continue forever and ever. So the problem that has occurred is when a strain occurs - when a muscle strain occurs there is a lot of damage to those muscle fibers and instead of the muscle rebuilding itself with new muscle, it actually rebuilds itself with scar tissue. The problem with scar tissue is that scar tissue is very, very weak and very inflexible. And so there is no movement in the scar tissue and when scar tissue forms in the muscle, it actually forms a weak spot in the muscle. We've worked with athletes, especially with this exact hamstring injury and you can really feel the scar tissue in the hamstring muscle, in the belly of the muscle. You can feel the scar tissue that has built up over time from this repeated injury over and over again. So until we get rid of that scar tissue, you're going to have the same problem. So there are definitely a number of techniques that can be used that I mentioned earlier on our articles on our website. We have a stack of articles specifically about soft tissue injury and how to properly treat it and they are about 10 pages long.
They go into a lot of detail, so what I'll do here is I'll give you a brief overview of the rehab process and then if you want more information you can go to our website thestretchinginstitute.com. So initially, in the first few hours of an injury, you would want to practice what is commonly known as the Rising Technique, which is rest, ice, compression, and elevation. Okay, and that's the first part of the rehab process. The next part of the process to look at are activities that promote healing. So we moved away from using the RICE regimen initially, and the whole point of the RICE regimen is to reduce swelling, reduce blood flow at the site of the injury, which in turn helps prevent the formation of this scar tissue will limit. So that's an important first part of getting over these kinds of injuries.
Second, we need to look at activities that help with muscle and soft tissue repair and regeneration. So we are, we're looking at things like massage and heat; things like this -- now these as opposed to what the rice machine does, these begin to promote blood flow. These get the blood flowing to the injured area where the oxygen in the nutrients, and so on, begins to heal the damage, and so on. An important part of getting rid of the scar tissue is massage and stretching. The massage and stretching helps to realign these scar tissue fibers.
It helps get rid of them and it helps the muscle get back to the way it was before the injury Without this part of massage and stretching and of course very gentle stretching at this point in the recovery process – without this process of massage and stretching, you just don't get rid of this scar tissue and you keep having the same problem over and over again. So this phase of the rehab process usually takes between 5 and 15 days depending on how aggressive you are with these injury rehab techniques and so on.
What you will discover after about two to three weeks is that the athlete will really feel that the injury is gone. This is actually quite a dangerous time for the athlete as they begin to regain some confidence. They start to feel, "yeah, I'm fine," "my injury is better now," and they start training hard again and they just re-injure themselves and they start the whole cycle over again. This last part of the injury rehabilitation process is quite important. Just as important as all other processes. In this final part of injury rehabilitation, you prepare the athlete to return to competition training. When we work with an injured athlete, our goal is always to get that athlete back to 110% of what he was before the injury. A lot of people say, "Whoa, whoa, how do you get someone 110% better than they were."? Simply what we're trying to do is we're trying to make the injured area stronger than it was before the injury, we're trying to make it more flexible and pliable and supple than it was before the injury, we're trying to make the injured area more capable to handle explosive or plyometric activities, and so on. All those things are quite keen on completing the injury rehabilitation process.
We use things like of course strength training, weight training and so on. We use some advanced stretches like PNF stretches, isolated stretches, active isolated stretches, active stretches, and a few other different things to really, really condition the muscle. We use a lot of plyometric and explosive activities to really fine-tune the area and make sure we're well and truly over that injury and when we go back to 100% training that the injured area is able to handle everything that is thrown at it. As I said, that's a brief overview of the process. There is much more detailed information on our website and can be found at thestretchinginstitute.com.
Interviewer: Okay, that's great. We have one more question if you have time.
Brad: Yes.
Interviewer: Awesome. asks Juan in Miami, one of his clients he trains every football season, appears to have a groin injury, but he suspects it's actually a hip flexor and not a groin injury. What would you say would be a good stretching program to promote healing of the hip flexor, if so does he think it's overexerted?
Brad: Okay. Yes, yes, again, another common injury in athletes, especially sprinters and sports that involve a lot of sprinting and a lot of fast, fast acceleration, and so on. The hip flexor, which is actually two muscles, that make up the Iliopsoas muscles and this is a common point of injury, right in that hip point there. Again, my first recommendation would be to go through some of those injury recovery components that I just talked about. So of course if the injury is an old injury then there is no need to start with the RICE - with the rest, ice compression and elevation, but I would start with some Injury Rehab techniques like massage, gentle stretching, maybe some ultrasound and things like that. This again promotes blood flow to the area and aids in the healing process.
My second recommendation would be to include some stretches around the hip, so not necessarily for the hip flexors, not necessarily for those iliopsoas muscles and the quads, and so on. Especially in the early stages of the rehabilitation process, I would avoid intense or aggressive stretches in that area. I would incorporate a lot of massage and gentle stretching and the other thing I would do is do a lot of stretching in this area. So, for example, I would do a lot of hip and glute stretches, a lot of groin stretches, hamstring stretches, lower back stretches, and so on. What many people don't understand is that one muscle has a very big effect on other muscles in the body.
A common example of this another hip problem is piriformis syndrome and the piriformis muscle is a little muscle deep in the hip and a lot of people come to us and they say "I have piriformis syndrome can you give me some piriformis stretches?” In many cases, there's no point in trying to stretch the piriformis because the muscles around the piriformis, again, the hips, the buttocks, the groin, the adductors, the hamstrings, all of these muscles are so tense that we're stretching the piriformis. there's no way to stretch that muscle without doing some flexibility work on the muscles around it.So yeah, my second suggestion would be to do a lot of stretches around that hip.
As I said before, the lower back is very important, especially the hips and the buttocks, the Gluteus Max muscles, those are very important and I would -- I would use a lot of PNF stretch. Again, if you're not familiar with PNF stretching, we have articles on our website that go into it in detail. PNF stretching is very good for improving flexibility and so on. So that that would be my first choice for the type of stretching I would do and so on. So one, I hope it helped you and if you are interested in specific stretches you can do, for example, you know pictures and descriptions and so on. Again, just go to our website and we have some free stuff there and we also have some paid products.
One of our products called the "Stretching Handbook" which has 135 pictures of different stretches you can do and I don't have it right with me right now but I think from memory for that hip and buttock area, there are about 12 stretches, for the lower back there are almost 20 stretches, for the hamstrings there are 15, for the groin there are 8, for the adductors there are 8. So there are loads and loads of stretches that you can reference so you don't doing the same stretches over and over. I hope this helped you and again, as I said before, if you have any specific questions feel free to ask us through our website.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you very much. Have a nice day, Brad.
Brad: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Interviewer: Have fun with it.