Great stuff, crambida!
I will say this: if you are doing 2 x 1 hour a week at the climbing gym, you are “stretching” and doing mobility work without having to think about it :).
The article you linked to is not a good one, imo, although I can understand why it put you off “stretching”. In the first place, this is someone who chooses not to believe anything that hasn’t been “proved” by a journal article, or mostly, in this case, by meta-analyses. When he looks outside the journals he firstly quotes “…many Kenyans don’t stretch”, but also has an anecdote about Kenyans laughing at Kipchoge while they (and he) stretches.
I was “just” in Kenya for three weeks – Kenyan elite runners “stretch” a LOT – both dynamic (mostly) and statically.
Same opening quote: “Why was legendary coach Arthur Lydiard not a fan of stretching?” Arthur was not a fan of conventional “stretching”, but he was a HUGE fan of mobility and dynamic stretching: he had a hill drill (taught at Lydiard Foundation courses to this day) designed SPECIFICALLY to stretch the calf muscles and tone the Achilles tendons. There’s never been a journal article written on that.
Apart from these and other inaccuracies, my biggest beef with the article is that the guy has managed to write going on for 18,000 words on “stretching” without mentioning fascia ONCE. Incredible! So I can’t take it seriously at all.
As the quote from David Moorcroft’s coach makes clear, runners in particular have to balance the need to restore the range of motion they need to function efficiently, without losing the essential rigidity they need for power transfer, or “recoil”. Kipchoge has that perfectly, and the Kenyans in general have much more of it than “we” do – they don’t run like “us”.
I used to think, like this guy and those he quotes, that the best “stretching” for running was sprinting. Then I found out that 100m and 200m sprinter Michael Johnson (four Olympic golds, multiple world records) HEAVILY used the Active Isolated Stretching system of Aaron Mattes – one of the systems of “stretching” dismissed by your painscience guy. The elite physio Gerard Hartmann reports: “For instance, behind the glamour of the amazing Michael Johnson is a warm-up routine that has 40 minutes of isolated stretching as the main ingredient. Eighty percent of Michael’s pre-race warm-up is done stretching on a treatment table – with very minimal running before going onto the start blocks.”
My point is, there is “stretching” and then there is movement stuff that works..I guess we all have to find what that is for ourselves.
Simon.
