I remember many years ago when I got a gym membership and started working out it was the norm to stretch before a workout. I had heard from preliminary studies that stretching before weight training could actually hinder your workout and thus your results. I decided to incorporate my stretching as a post-workout exercise and part of my cool-down. I saw some nice gains in strength almost right away. I then moved my cardio to post-weight training and, while I saw a decrease in my cardio performance, my muscle gain and pump increased dramatically. At one point my gains were so good I had to get new dress shirts because I couldn’t button the top button anymore and I could barely move my arms to a flex position. I still keep one of the old shirts around just to see how much I’ve bulked up 
This was all natural too as I never took supplements (except for multi-vitamins) and protein shakes gave me really bad gas 
This Friday Health Check shows some more recent studies that seem to back up the results I’ve personally experienced. To each their own though, everbody’s body reacts differently to stimuli and there are so many other variables. Experiment and find your best fit to maximize strength gains.
Static Stretching Decreases Leg Power
Static stretching has been part of the standard pre-exercise warm-up for more than 100 years. Until recently, most exercise books urged people to stretch large muscles thoroughly before doing powerful movements, such as sprinting, jumping or throwing. Many recent studies showed that pre-exercise stretching decreased muscle strength and might increase the risk of injury. Yet, weekend warriors commonly stretch before a game of tennis or golf.
Japanese researchers found that pre-exercise stretching decreased power (the ability to exert force rapidly). Power output at 5 percent, 30 percent and 60 percent of maximum strength was much lower than when subjects did nothing before the exercise test. Recent research from the U.S. Army showed that an active, full-body warm-up improved exercise performance in powerful movements much better than stretching. Stretching is still important, but do it after exercise, when muscles are warm and you don’t have to perform powerful movements. (Journal Strength Conditioning Research, 20: 804-810, 2006)
Posted on June 29th, 2007 by Leo
Filed under: Friday Health Check
Hey! When are you going back to Crossfit? I’m starting again on Monday at 5.
Hey Leo, I got your message on MyBlogLog. I’ve got you on my feed reader so I’ve got no excuse for missing a post
Anyway regarding decreasing muscle power by pre-stretching, I can only assume that by stretching you are taxing your fast twitch muscles and lessening their potential power? I’m no doctor but that makes sense to me.
Keep up the posts!
Hey Matt, thanks for checking me out on feed reader. I’m still used to actually visiting sites.
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