Originally Posted by
aclinjury
The study on stretching listed earlier is misleading when it says that stretching has no benefits. In the article, it cited the girls soccer team study, which found that 'warmups" prevent injuries..and that those warmups didn't specifically include stretching. Well guess what, when you're warming up.. you are effectively stretching your muscles.
This has been studied to death, and stretching does not warm up your muscles. The two things have virtually nothing to do with each other. People looking for scientific reasons to stretch always end up grasping for straws like you just did.
Warming up is simply doing a milder version of the activity you're about to engage in or something very similar. Stretching is a special activity totally unlike the main activity of the workout, unless your workouts are yoga. All of the systematic studies of pre-workout stretching indicate that it adversely affects performance slightly and makes people slightly more prone to injury. "It's probably not that bad for you" is about as good as the case gets for stretching.
Some of us spent decades having gym instructors and the like forcing us to stretch even though it hurt and did nothing good for us. I'm just not very flexible (that's almost entirely genetic and really has next to nothing to do with bicycle performance), so making me stretch is a bit of a mini-torture. Consequently, I have no tolerance for people trying to tout benefits it doesn't bestow, and who insist that other people should do it.