Thread: streching time
View Single Post
  #2 (permalink)  
Old 11-04-1999, 03:32 PM
Bernie's Avatar
Bernie Bernie is offline
Avocado Advocate
 
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: St Louis MO, USA
It was me who posted that. As far as I know, holding for longer is fine, but up to a point. If you stretch for too long, and ten minutes on one muscle is probably too long, you can then increase your chance for injury because the muscle will start to tighten during the stretch. That's why it starts to feel uncomfortable after a while. This won't maximize your progress as you'd expect from stretching for such long periods of time.
A better way to stretch for 10 minutes would be to stretch for 2-3 minutes, relax 1 minute, then stretch another 2-3 minutes, relax, and repeat up to 10 minutes total time. Who knows, maybe you can go on 30 minutes that way? This way would have much better benefit than holding a stretch -and I certainly wouldn't hold a stretch for 30 minutes! Worse yet, I wouldn't want to try to stand up quickly after holding a stretch that long!

Bernie

Reply With Quote