Another reason to stretch

I know stretching is good for you and all that, but I've never really been interested in it. Probably because, when I really started exercising with commitment and regularity, my time was extremely limited. I had a toddler at home and tons of stuff to do. I wanted to use the little bit of time I did have for working out to totally go for it. Stretching just fell by the wayside, and even though I've generally got more time to exercise nowadays, I've never made it a regular component of my workouts. Even when I was doing marathon training last year and ended the long runs feeling like my legs might break off at the hip, my stretching was really no more than cursory. Like I wrote above, I'm just not interested in it -- and I've never really felt that it does much for me.

Until now. Thanks to a study by the fine folks at Brigham Young University, I've got a concrete reason to stretch. Here's a synopsis: "Participants who weight trained three times per week and stretched two times per week for eight weeks INCREASED THEIR STRENGTH BY UP TO TWICE AS MUCH as those who only lifted." (Caps mine.)

A few more details: participants in the study did stretching exercises for 30 minutes on their non-weight training days. And none of the participants had done weight training before. I don't know if I could commit to 30 minutes of stretching on my non-weight days ... sometimes an hour of cardio is all I can squeeze in, and I wouldn't be willing to trade any of it away for stretching (there's that bad attitude rearing its head again). And I'm certainly not a newcomer to weight training, so my gains might not be as significant.

But I still find this interesting -- and if the idea of increased strength gains from my weight training is enough to get me to start stretching regularly, that's got to be a good thing, right?

One more interesting thing I read, along these same lines: early research shows that stretching has the same effect on muscles that weight training does. Both cause minute tears in the muscle fiber, which (through a complicated body process) eventually lead to new muscle growth.

So there you have it. I'm going to start stretching. Now if I could just find more time.

While I'm working that out, here's a shameless plug for my very favorite yoga superstar, Bryan Kest. His power yoga workouts are the very best and will totally leave you feeling stretched out to within an inch of your life. There's a link to his website on the right side of this page and from there, you can buy DVDs or download podcasts. I've got a couple of his DVDs and, now that I've proclaimed my desire to incorporate stretching into my workout routine, hopefully they'll be in more regular rotation than they've been in the past couple years.