Remember as a kid when the gym teacher would start every class with a few stretching exercises? You might have hated it, but she knew what she was doing.
Stretching may seem like a waste of time, but the process protects your joints and muscles to help you exercise more effectively. If it reduces the stress on your body, that means less injury potential every time you workout.
While it might not be your favorite thing to do, stretching has a lot of benefits beyond reducing potential injury.
It improves flexibility
This is an easy one. It doesn’t take more than a few toe touches to realize that stretching out makes your body move better. And that’s why you should do it. It keeps your muscles limber and helps give your connective and muscular tissues in full range of motion. That’s a very good thing as you age.
It helps relieve pain
If you’ve ever experienced shoulder, back or knee pain, you’ve probably experienced the relief that comes from stretching the muscles a bit. That’s because stretching increases blood flow to those areas, which in turn helps alleviate the aches and pains in that area.
It’s a good stress reliever
Stretching is like yoga; it helps relieve your stress. When you stretch out the muscles that have compressed after a long day at work, you can feel the internal pain slip away.
It increases recovery
Because stretching starts the blood flowing, it can help repair damage to your joints and muscles on a quicker basis.
Simply don’t have time to stretch in your busy day? There are easy ways to make it a part of your routine.
Add a little yoga into your routine first thing in the morning and before you turn in for the night.
Or focus only on the muscles that need it most. If you’re heading to an upper body workout, spend the time stretching out your shoulders. Save the hamstrings and knee joint stretches for when you’ll do a lower body routine.
How do you incorporate stretching into your daily routine?