The Athlete

Benefits of Stretching

An exercise, which conditions your muscles and warms them up before a strenuous workout, is stretching. It increases the flexibility of your muscles, joints and bones. Before starting up on any exercise, it is essential to build up your body temperature, as cold muscles cannot exercise well. Therefore, a bit of stretching will increase the temperature and warm up the muscles.

When you try stretching, you should not strain to the extent of pain. This will only create more problems for you as such strain will pull the muscles and the result will be a ligament tear. When you perform the different types of exercises to stretch your muscles, you are conditioning the full nervous system and your back. This enhances your figure and your posture.

There are many different stretching exercises for the different parts of your body and for doing at different time too. Some of these exercises are for doing before your total workouts like neck exercises to stretch the muscles of the neck and head; hip exercises to stretch out the muscles of your abdomen and hips. Similarly, there are many more for your feet, legs, hands, etc. Some are for doing at the end of the workouts.

Elderly people have problems with their knees and elbows. With age, collagen deposits in the tissues make them stiff. However, you can find the much-needed relief through stretching. You can then bend and jump just like any other youngster. There is an overall strengthening of the entire body and the coordination levels between the different organs are quite high.

There are different stretching exercises in yoga. While doing these you need to allow free inhaling and exhaling of air to wash off the toxins from the body, leaving you refreshed. You can do these exercises bi-weekly or more than that if your health permits to do so. The best thing about these exercises is that you do not have to shell out a single penny for the same.