Stretching One: What Is Stretching and Why Is It Important?
Stretching has long been hailed as one of the best things you can do for your muscles, but what is it and is it really that important? What Is Stretching and Is It Important? For the next few wellness posts, we will be focusing on stretching. What is it? Why do we do it? When do we do it? How do we do it? These are only some of the questions we will be answering. This post we will be explaining what stretching is and the different kinds of stretching as well as some of the claimed benefits and a dive into whether any of these claims have merit based on science. From a young age we are taught to stretch our muscles to relieve tension, improve flexibility and even to improve our athletic ability, but does it actually work like we think it does? Yes and no. It depends on what you are hoping to get out of it. There are different kinds of stretches that can be performed on individual muscles or muscle groups. The three major kinds are: Static, Dynamic and Pre-Contraction stretche...