Stretching before exercise: an evidence based approach
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 . . .
related content
- “Reducing risk of injury due to exercise: Stretching before exercise does not help,” Domhnall MacAuley, British Medical Journal, 2002.
- “Stretching ‘fails to stop muscle injury’,” News.BBC.co.uk.
One article on PainScience.com cites Shrier 2000 as a source:
- PS Quite a Stretch — Stretching science has shown that this extremely popular form of exercise has almost no measurable benefits
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of the power pose effect with informed and default priors: the case of felt power. Gronau 2017 Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology.
- The neck and headaches. Bogduk 2014 Neurol Clin.
- Agreement of self-reported items and clinically assessed nerve root involvement (or sciatica) in a primary care setting. Konstantinou 2012 Eur Spine J.
- Effect of NSAIDs on Recovery From Acute Skeletal Muscle Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Morelli 2017 Am J Sports Med.
- Association of Spinal Manipulative Therapy With Clinical Benefit and Harm for Acute Low Back Pain: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Paige 2017 JAMA.