ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — If you think stretching is only for athletes, you’re wrong. Experts say stretching is good for everyone, and a 2023 study found that adults who stretched five days a week had a 20% lower risk of dying over the next nine years than those who didn’t. Our experts share what stretches you should start doing today and why.
If you go straight from sitting to exercising, you could be setting yourself up for a serious injury!
“Everybody needs to stretch. It’s really important to help your body stay mobile. It helps with recovery. It helps to prevent injury and just helps you live a better quality of life,” said Tatyana Siddeeq, lead flexologist for StretchLab Winter Park.
And you shouldn’t just stretch when you feel tight.
“When we don’t stretch, we will lose our flexibility and over time that’s gonna limit our mobility and our range of motion,” explained Caitlin Ann Cheruka, PhD, clinical assistant professor at the University of Central Florida.
And that range of motion can be lost in 4-8 weeks. But you don’t want to stretch to the point of pain.
“If you’re going from a scale of zero to 10, you wanna get to maybe that seven mark. Once you get to that nine, 10 mark, that is when there’s a greater chance of injury,” Siddeeq told Ivanhoe.
Siddeeq recommends that everyone do the forward fold, which opens your back and loosens up your hamstrings and calves. If you sit a lot every day, Prof. Cheruka recommends the hip flexer.
She also recommends targeting every muscle group, so you should also do the hamstring stretch, chest opener, quadriceps stretch, and shoulder stretch. And one more reason to stretch:
“Stretching can help improve our cardiovascular health, which is super important because we know that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide,” said Prof. Cheruka.
Finally, when is the best time to stretch? Prof. Cheruka says before a sport, after a sport, and any day you don’t do a sport! In other words, whenever you can.
If you’re considering trying stretching to fix your back pain, Prof. Cheruka recommends strengthening exercises instead. Stretching may only provide temporary relief. To help back pain you should focus on developing core strength.
Contributors to this news report include: Marcy Wilder, Associate Producer; Chuck Bennethum, Videographer & Editor.
Sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37316812/
* For More Information, Contact: Margot Winick
Communications Manager at University of Central Florida Communications and Marketing
And go to https://www.stretchlab.com/ to contact a location near year.
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