Stretching before exercise: an evidence based approach

updated Aug 17, 2015

Tags: stretch, exercise, self-treatment, treatment, muscle

PainSci summary of Shrier 2000?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided at the bottom of the page, as often as possible. ★★★★★?5-star ratings are for sentinel studies, excellent experiments with meaningful results. Ratings are a highly subjective opinion, and subject to revision at any time. If you think this paper has been incorrectly rated, please let me know.

This article is technical, but it is also excellent and heavily referenced. See MacAuley or Stretching ‘fails to stop muscle injury’ for closely related material, but more readable.

original abstract†Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.

Clinicians are under increasing pressure to base their treatment of patients on research findings—that is, to practice evidence based medicine.1 Although some authors argue that only research from human randomised clinical trials (RCTs) should be used to determine clinical management,2 an alternative is to consider the study design (RCT, cohort, basic science, etc) as one of many variables, and that no evidence should be discarded a priori. In other words, the careful interpretation of all evidence is, and has always been, the real art of medicine.3 This editorial explores these concepts using the sport medicine example of promoting stretching before exercise to prevent injury. In summary, a previous critical review of both clinical and basic science literature suggested that such stretching would not prevent injury.4 This conclusion was subsequently supported by a large RCT published five months later.5 Had the review relied only on previous . . .

original abstract†Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.

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