Stretching Exercises For Health And Fitness
Optimum health and well-being are attained and maintained through a balanced program of nutrition, exercise, and rest. Often the body becomes imbalanced, resulting in sickness or injury. Muscle weakness and inflexibility are present in a high percentage of the adult population.
Stretching Flexibility
Stretching is intended to a simple, painless method of preparation for movement. Many techniques tend to aggravate the tissues and result in immediate pain or later soreness. There is a unanimous agreement that flexibility is specific; that is, the degree of range of motion is specific for each joint. For example, a flexible shoulder does not ensure a flexible ankle, and the range of motion in one hip may not be highly related to a range of motion in the other hip.
In healing, stretching is an important modality for regaining flexibility. Flexibility coupled with strength helps develop body fitness, posture, and symmetry and it assists in alleviating pain and increases relaxation.
The potential benefits of flexibility are virtually unlimited:
- Circulation is improved
- Oxygen is delivered faster and more efficiently
- The lymphatic system is aided to work with greater effectiveness
- Nutrition is delivered to tissue
- Cells are no longer ischemic
Stretching To Improve Health And Suppleness
Flexibility, it turns out, is the significant metaphor. Serious athletes-the ones who last for very long, anyway eventually come to understand that the single physical asset most critical to the continued and successful hard use of the human body isn’t strength or speed or endurance, but suppleness.
Suppleness-loose and easy flexibility is the quality that defends against the harshness of our athletic experience; it slows the abruptness with which we approach our physical limits; it softens the blows. It is the source of our elasticity, the spring-loading in the biomechanics of athletics.
- Suppleness is the resilience of specific body tissues, but it is also the resilience of our larger systems, the capacity to adjust to a wide range of demands, athletic or otherwise.
- The suppleness of tissue contributes to the suppleness of everything else; there is a direct physiological link between these two kinds of resilience.
Why Stretching Exercise Is So Important?
One of the tools to maintain health and fitness is stretching. Among serious athletes and their trainers, stretching has become almost universally accepted as the best technique for warming up and cooling down, as preparation for action, and as therapy for its excesses. Yet stretching remains controversial because it is poorly understood even by its greatest supporters. There has been a fundamental omission in the way the world of athletics has perceived stretching.
Well-chosen stretching exercises can help the individual regain a long range of motion. Consistent flexibility training will help maintain tissue health and help prevent or alleviate pain or injury. Along with the aging process, there is a frequent loss of flexibility, strength, and stamina. A well-constructed stretching program can help to restore those qualities.
What Happens If You Do Not Stretch?
The soft tissue of our musculoskeletal system-mainly the muscular and also the connective tissue-reacts to excessive use by shrinking and tightening up. Its reaction to under-use, inexplicably, is much identical. We understand completely that injury leads to “stiffness”, that lack of exercise causes stiffness, that aging brings about stiffness.
But we now have it in reverse: stiffness could be the cause, not the effect. You do not lose suppleness because you get old or out of shape, you become old or out of shape, or getting injured is simply because you could have lost suppleness. Preserving full physical usefulness is known as an issue of harmonizing degrees of use to maintain suppleness.
