If you have a goal in mind and you want to achieve that goal, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes.

And if you're not, you're never going to reach that goal.

What is going on, everyone?

Welcome to the Fit, Healthy, and Happy podcast.

I'm your host, Josh, here with my co-host.

KG in the House!

And today we have a really fun question. This is something we're asked quite often. It's how important is stretching really? So obviously there's a lot of different ways to approach this question. But we're just going to try. And we've kind of been trying to figure out what we want to do with this Thursday episode. But we just want to kind of cover one topic covered in depth, give your honest opinion on it, and then just allow you to kind of take it out and use it and use it in an actionable way in your real kind of day-to-day life. Yeah, buddy. So the first thing to consider with stretching is there's multiple forms of stretching, right? So if you static stretching it just essentially means you're holding that stretch so you know if i put my arm across my

chest and i hold it and squeeze that is a static stretch right i'm lengthening the muscle i'm holding it

in that lengthen position and i'm stretching it out right so muscles themselves if you think of like a rubber

band are quite tight naturally um but they think of like a rubber band are quite tight

naturally um but they can expand like a rubber band if you pull on it but if you pull on it it

kind of wants to pull back so with the muscle if you extend it it will kind of get more locked in that

position and become a little looser so it won't be really tight and spring loaded now you would think

hey it being looser is a better thing, but not necessarily. In the terms of

performance, you actually want a tighter muscle. You don't want to extend it because if you think

about it, a tighter muscle can generate more power and have more ability to do so. So they actually

did a test with Olympic sprinters and they had some of them do no stretching, some of them do

dynamic stretching, which is my next topic. And a dynamic stretch is essentially things that are quick movement. So you're kicking your feet around, you're swinging your arms, you're doing arm circles, you're doing fast moving shrugs, you're doing these things where you're not necessarily holding a set position, you're going into that position out of it, quick, you know, getting blood flow to the muscle. And in this way, you're still allowing it to, you know, once again, be warm and develop, but for it to still be tight enough to perform. So throughout the test, they found that the second best result was the people that did nothing at all. So they actually did better than the people that did the static stretching. And, you know, when I get new clients coming in, I saw a lot of people just, you know, doing toe touches, doing the quad stretch. Always before the workout too. Exactly. Always. And this is kind of just a misnomer. And this is something people thought was better. But once again, the science has shown that this is actually even more detrimental than not stretching at all. So the solution is the third, which is dynamic stretching. So trying to do quick active movements that are going to kind of get it warmed up and get you ready to go. So once again, you can do this relative to the movement. So if you were to do squats, for instance, right, you could go ahead and you could start by saying, okay, I want to warm up my hips. So you can kind of do some frogs where you like put your feet wide and you push into your hips in and out. Once again, I'm not trying to hold that stretch for 20 seconds. I'm just trying to hit that depth, get comfortable, move around. I'm kicking my legs around. You can do some cat cows. You can just do things to activate. We're not necessarily holding that static position, but you are moving pretty rapidly, delivering blood flow to the muscle

and optimizing it to be safe and perform. So the number one thing in terms of stretching is just

warming things up and keeping it safe. So our goal is to prevent injury. So once again,

that's why you want that stiffer muscle. It'll keep it hard. It'll keep it in control. And that's

why when you develop yourself in terms of muscularity, that's different muscle, like even if you were to fall or something, it's in that position to protect itself, harden up and not pull. Whereas when you loosen it with that static stretching, it can be more vulnerable. So you can actually get more injured by doing that first, which is interesting. So always think to start with your dynamic stretches and then to go to your static

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