 Motocross Racer: Caden Mitchell Photo: Zachary C. Bako Joel YounkinsHigh Performance Coach Stretching, another common misunderstood topic in all of fitness and especially motocross training.
There's a lot of common beliefs and misconceptions around stretching. Many believe that stretching will help with injury prevention, while others believe stretching is completely pointless and it can decrease performance. Confusing right?! Lets break it all down for you. What Stretching Does Stretching is a phase where you place tension on muscle by forcing the fibers to lengthen beyond their resting/relaxed state. The purpose and theory for this is to help lengthen the muscles to create more flexibility in your muscles. Stretching is not the same as mobility, as people often get this confused. As stretching is related to muscles lengthening while mobility is covering the degrees of motion within each joint of the body (more on mobility in another blog). We have this thing called muscle tone, it's our brain and nervous system sending signals to our muscles to keep them slightly engaged at all times, even when they're in a "relaxed state." Stretching has a lot more to do with the brain, than it does with the muscles themselves. The more the brain sends signals to create more tone, the tighter the muscles become. Think about when you're training hard, you're muscles have a harder and more dense feel to them right? The brain does this for a number of reasons, but the first and most important reason is as it's a threat to survival. When a muscle is fatigued, weak, injured, or there's an unstable joint that's connecting to the muscles/tendon, the brain will create stiffness to protect the body from further danger. When you actively stretch a muscle, you are sending a relaxation signal back to the brain to tell it to relax and to lessen the muscle tone. One of the primary reasons I subscribe stretching is to promote recovery. When you train, ride, and race, muscles take a lot of stress, pressure, and damage (physically and metabolically) that can cause a build up on tension and tone. For your muscles to recover, it helps when they're in a relaxed state. For example, after a hard day of squats or long motos, your quads may feel sore and tight from fatigue. Because of this, your nervous system will be "engaged" and this can prolong recovery. If you can go in to stretch and create a relax and recover environment, those muscles can relax and begin to actively rest and hopefully speed up your recovery. Remember, your body is either is fight or flight or rest in recover. What Stretching Doesn't Do There's a lot of association with stretching and reducing injuries. For some reason, people love to try to connect the dots between being flexible and reducing injures. The reality is, stretching actually does very little to reduce the risk, whereas strength training and overall improved fitness levels will help reduce injuries way before a good stretching routine will. Stretching also doesn't improve strength/power or endurance when you're riding. Even though I discussed it can help with recovery, it doesn't help decrease muscle soreness. The means of recovery that I covered, is more of a systemic approach but isn't promised to speed up DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) as they are separate mechanisms. Lastly, stretching alone, should not and does not replace an active warm up. If you just stretch for a minute or two and hop on your bike, that's not going to cut it. Remember, stretching promotes rest/recovery and that's not the signal you want to send to you body right before you need to ask it to highly activated. How and When to Stretch This is one of those topics where there's not a lot of hard rules to follow. Stretching is important, but nobody has ever won a championship because they were on a super sweet stretching program. That's not to say it's not important, but it's like an add-on. It's like ordering an extra side to your main course meal. You can actually get away will doing no stretching at all if you're physical preparation program is already good, but I do advise it is a great idea to add it in. To stretch, you don't need to over complicate it all. All basic stretches are going to yield a solid effect, the names of them or positions don't need to be fancy or crazy. You don't need to follow a routine that has a cool name either, you just need to make it a priority. What I can tell you for motocross and off-road racers, stretching your quads/hip flexors, hamstring, glutes, pecs, lats, and forearms are going to be a great place to start. From there, you can break it down to specific needs for yourself. When you stretch, you want to go into a position where you feel the stretch happening, but you can still talk. If you're left speechless, you're probably going too far and you're body isn't going to respond well to that. Hell, something might even pop. But it's important to breath deeply, stay calm and relaxed. You can hold each stretch for a solid 30 seconds. Stretching is one of those things that you can do daily, I recommend this even just taking 5-10 minutes. This helps keep the muscles relaxed between training and practice sessions. But on the other hand, you can do it as little as needed or a couple times a week. You can perform static stretching as a morning routine, post workouts, mid-day, evenings, and even during workouts. During a strength training session, you can stretch an antagonist muscle group of what you're working. For example, if you're feeling tight on squats, it's common to stretch your glutes out between sets to help open you up. You can stretch pre-workout or pre-riding if it feels like it helps, but I do highly encourage that after the stretching is complete, you must re-activate the muscles again with a proper warm up. For example, if you like to stretch your hamstrings before you ride, be sure to follow that up with something like Good Mornings to reactivate the muscles to get them ready to be used. Also, you can incorporate stretching into a recovery, blood flow focused workout. This is where you can perform 10-20 minutes of light aerobic conditioning, and then pair that with 2-5 minutes of stretching, and repeat this process 2-3 times to either recovery from a race, or to use at the end of the week to get ready for a weekend of racing. Stretch to Feel Good For some reason, a lot of people get really emotionally attached to stretching. If you make a comment to them that stretching isn't super important, they look at you like they're about to explode. It's not that stretching doesn't do anything, it's just that there's a lot of other things to prioritize first that will make a bigger impact than stretching will for you. It's common to believe that stretching will help drastically improve range of motion in the body. And this can certainly help, especially in an acute phase. But it's really hard to make permanent changes to the body with stretching alone. A lot of people can stretch for years without seeing much change in their flexibility. Until they incorporate a proper strength training routine that includes training at full ROM (range of motion), is when they see real drastic changes. Again, when the body sees a threat to the body (weakness/dysfunction/injury), it creates stiffness to protect itself. Most of the time, stretching doesn't solve these problems for people/athletes/racers. It takes more effort than just bending over trying to touch your toes to solve why your body is tight in the first place. I don't want to sit here and make it seem like stretching is a waste of your time. Just remember, it's a rest and relaxation phase to the body. And this is exactly how it should be used. Stretching helps turn off muscle tone to the active stretching muscles by lengthening them to be able to relax. This helps during recovery phases, takes pressure off of your joints, and can aid in increased ranges of motion when properly paired with other modalities. But nevertheless, use stretching as a means to help you feel good, so that you can ride and train good.
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