Stretching Boosts Muscle Strength and Size!
Extra, extra, read all about it! That’s right, a study showed that stretching increased muscle strength and size — like pumping iron, but without the pumping, or the iron. Those results certainly are physiologically intriguing. They suggest that muscle adapts in more or less the same way to almost any kind of strong stimulus — not just exhausting it with contraction. Neat, if true. Not greatly surprising, but neat.
It’s not very practical information, though, because the stretching protocol they used is just bonkers, and sounds like pure torture to me. An hour per day? At close to maximum stretch discomfort? For one muscle? Sheesh. 😮 Even half that intensity for half as long would be a veeery impractical way to build any muscle.
But now you know: pull on a muscle hard enough and long enough, and your body might say, “Okay, fine, we’ll upgrade that.”