Lift Weights, Be Flexible
Filed under: Training
When most people think of improving their flexibility, they immediately think of stretching. Static stretching to be even more specific. Secondarily, they might think of something like yoga, often touted as the best way to improve your flexibility.
When people think of weight training and flexibility, they often think of lifting weights as causing you to get all muscley and “tight”. This absurb and incorrect notion has been perpetuated by the mass media and people following poorly designed training programs full of poor exercise selections and partial ranges of motion.
However, many of us strength coaches have often advocated that when done appropriately and with a full range of motion, resistance training will improve your flexibility and mobility, as we have seen it time and time again. Well, research is finally coming around to investigate this issue, and what do you think they are finding?
Most people would assume that static stretching is superior to resistance training for flexibility, but in fact a pilot study from the American College of Sports Medicine found this:
“The results suggest that carefully constructed, full-range resistance training regimens can improve flexibility as well as—or perhaps better than—typical static stretching regimens,” said James R. Whitehead, Ed.D., FACSM, presenting author of the study.
The results showed no statistically significant advantage of stretching over resistance training. Resistance training, in fact, produced greater improvements in flexibility in some cases, while also improving strength.”
In addition to this study, there has also been some recent research showing that static stretching mainly increases our tolerance to the stretch, without actually lengthening the sarcomeres or increasing dynamic range of motion.
I am not saying that there isn’t a time and a place for static stretching, but let’s just keep it in mind as one tool in our tool box for improving flexibility and mobility, not as a panacea for those parameters.
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Posted on February 1st, 2011 by Brian St. Pierre
1 Comment
February 1st, 2011 at 10:04 am
This is excellent, I feel like the benefits of strength training for mobiliyt is not mentioned nearly as much as it should be.