Originally Posted by Springer240
I never was under the impression that it would help gains. My understanding was it is used to prevent injury, and it may (as in it might have the ability to) help gains for ‘x’ amount of reasons. There are also ‘x’ amount of reasons why not warming up might help gains. While I’m sure that warming up will undoubtedly not hurt you anyway, I’ve always felt that the gains made or lost by choosing to warm up is minute. Using Bird2 as an example, he never warmed up and is/was a great gainer. I initially warmed up, but found it too time consuming for something I felt to be trivial. I know it’s main purpose is safety, but I don’t see it doing much in terms of preventing anything. Now, I know I’m wrong because I’m sure it does much more than I think. Like running, your always supposed to stretch before you go running, right? Well, all through the school years, they made us run first and stretch later until my last 2 years in advanced gym. This always puzzled me on what was truly correct. Anyways, I’m comparing stretching to running like warming up to PE because it’s to prevent injury and I also compare warming up to whether or not you will burn less or more calories while running if you stretch before or after the run.
After taking a shit to ponder what I’ve just said, I would like to know whether you are supposed to stretch before or after you run, but I’m guessing many will say to do it both before and after. However, I would be interested in knowing you should stretch only after running.
I agree we are always just dealing with theories, not fact. This is true when talking about injury prevention or help with gains, but we can use the general known principles of sports medicine to theorize about what we do in PE.
One theory of how heat helps gains is by softening the connective tissue (tunica, ligaments, etc), so that it stretches more easily, and therefore, farther, when stress is applied. additionally, it is possible that the collagen in this tissue becomes more mobile when heated and does some rearranginging, so that it remodels to conform to the elongated state. I have even read of guys that applied ice after PE, to cool and freeze the tissue in its new configuration.