Stretching With Your Workouts

Do you want to make the most out of your exercise routine, have you been going at it for months and still not satisfied with results, are you looking for an edge to your exercises? Well if you answered yes to any of those, then you need to start doing stretches with your workouts.

Stretch before you start doing your workout. Use dynamic stretches here, this is going to help you get into your exercise better and will better prepare your muscles.

Dynamic stretches are stretches that prepare the body for specific movements. So the dynamic stretches for a football player would be different from that of a martial artist.

These are functional based and used to prepare the body for movements that are required for the exercise. It wouldn't make sense to stretch your legs before you started doing pushups. Although it wouldn't necessarily be bad to do that, you really are not getting what you want out of your stretch.

Getting blood flowing to your muscle before the work out will wake them up and make you perform better during the actually exercise part. This will also help to prevent pulling a muscle, and it decreases lactic acid build, which causes soreness.

Once you have done your workout and have torn all your muscle to pieces it is time to stretch again, but this time you won't want the dynamic stretches. You are going to do static stretches this time.

Static stretches are better for increasing flexibility, and for straining those muscles of that troublesome lactic acid. These are stretches involve pulling the muscle to a point of tension and holding it.

These have been shown to weaken muscles, much the same way that regular workouts do. So for a little extra muscle build do a static stretch after your routine.

However, statically stretching before you start your workout may decrease the amount of benefit you take from that workout. When doing these it is good to hold the stretch for 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

Thirty seconds is the least amount of time that can be spent on the stretch where you still receive benefits and two minutes is the longest amount of time. If you can hold your pose for more than two minutes you are probably not getting anything from that stretch and should reposition your body.

Remember to use the dynamic stretches before you start exercising and the static stretches after you have finished your workout. This will greatly decrease soreness and increase muscle build at the same time.

Destry Masterson is a health and fitness expert who has written many articles about exercise and recommends http://www.treadmillcomparison.com to compare treadmills. Contact Info: Destry Masterson - MyOnlineArticleWriting@gmail.com - Twitter: @DestryMasterson