Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today we are going to discuss the science and practice of flexibility and stretching.

Flexibility and stretching are topics that I believe do not receive nearly as much attention as they deserve.

For most people, the topics of flexibility and stretching bring to mind things like yoga, injury prevention, or maybe even contortionism.

But it turns out that flexibility and stretching are features that are built into our basic body plan.

Young children, young animals, and adults, and indeed older children and animals all stretch and all have some degree of flexibility.

It turns out that having flexibility and our ability to stretch and the interaction between stretching and flexibility are fundamental to how we move, our ability to learn new movements.

Indeed, also to prevent injury will repair injuries and to offsetting and reducing inflammation throughout the body.

In fact, today I'm going to share with you a remarkable set of studies that show that stretching can actually adjust things like tumor growth.

This is work that was done by one of the major directors of the National Institutes of Health.

So today's discussion will start with a description of the mechanisms, literally the cells and the connections from a nervous system that mediate flexibility and stretching.

And I promise that I'll make that information accessible to you whether or not you have a biology background or not.

Then with that information in hand, I'm going to present to you what the scientific literature says about the best times and ways to stretch.

Everything right down to the detail of how long to hold a stretch, whether or not to hold a stretch at all because it turns out there are multiple kinds of stretching.

So you can imagine you have stretches where you hold the stretch for a very long time and use as little momentum as possible.

And then there's also what's called dynamic and ballistic stretching where you're literally swinging your limbs trying to increase the range of motion.

I will explain the science and application of flexibility and stretching in the context of sports performance, whether or not you're engaging in cardiovascular exercise or resistance.

Exercise or both whether or not you're competitive athlete or simply a recreational exercise or as I am, whether or not you are trying to increase your range of motion and flexibility for longevity purposes or whether or not you're trying to do it in order to access different parts of your nervous system because we'll soon learn today that your ability to improve flexibility and

need to engage in specific stretching exercises can actually be used to powerfully modulate your ability to tolerate pain, both emotional and physical pain.

So this thing that we call flexibility and stretching is actually a vast landscape.

We're going to simplify and organize all that for you today and by the end of today's episode, you're going to have a number of simple easy to apply tools that are grounded in the best scientific research that you can apply for your specific goals.

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