The discussions rage among personal trainers and coaches. "Everybody needs to stretch." "Nobody needs to stretch." "Stretching before exercise prevents injury." "Stretching before exercise costs you power output or makes you prone to get injured."
Wherever you look, someone has a different opinion. However, when you examine the advice and the givers of that advice, you usually find the following...
- Naturally flexible people will either tell you that stretching is unnecessary.
- People who get injured a lot will tell you that stretching is vital.
- Anyone who feels they solved their injury issues by stretching will swear by it.
- Anyone who injured themselves after stretching (not necessarily because of it) will insist that stretching is bad for you.
- People with great flexibility are generally those who sign up for yoga classes. Inflexible people usually don't.
- And then there are the people who read small-scale sports science research. They'll have an opinion based on studies that confirm one side of the argument and ignore the studies that say the other.
All of this is human nature. We do what we're good at, we do what's easy or we do something because we believe it benefits us.
Regardless of the arguments, there absolutely are good reasons for doing mobility training.
Why Mobility Training is Important
Humans have a normal range of movement.
Regardless of your sport, there is a range of movement that you need to have, just to function as a human being. In my experience, athletes get injured more often when not training than they do when they are training. Why? Normal life demands different mobility to sport and not having that range predisposes you to injury.
As we age, we lose some of our flexibility and thus our mobility.
In the same way as cardiovascular fitness and strength are reversible, so is mobility. However, whilst the other other two respond quickly to training, mobility is something you have to spend consistent time working on. It takes a long time to develop and reverses fairly quickly, especially when you consider that most of us will spend very little time working on mobility compared to the amount of time we spend sitting in a chair every day.
Sports performance requires mobility, even if that's limited.
The people who notice this most are long distance triathletes. Going from cycling to running in an Ironman event challenges mobility severely. Running with shortened hip flexors and the associated posture tends to result in back injuries, hip injuries and knee injuries to name but a few.
Much like strength and cardio, it's the first two that are most important. This is especially true for endurance athletes and those who enjoy mostly cardiovascular training because these activities tend to happen in a repetitive, yet small, range of movement, which predisposes you to injury.
I like to think of it this way: You have appropriate mobility if you move well and pain-free on a daily basis.
If you look at yourself on video, do you like how you move? This is a great start.
There are some standards for the ideal range of movement at each joint but these generally require a professional assessment & you'd be unlikely to be able to measure them without such help.