The many benefits of flexibility training for athletes, and anyone who wants to improve their athletic ability.
If you’re looking to enhance your athletic performance, you might work on cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, and muscular stamina, but what about flexibility?
Despite being a core pillar of athleticism, flexibility is often overlooked. This is unfortunate, as there are numerous benefits of flexibility training for athletic performance and injury prevention.
For example, have you ever participated in a sport that required you to jump high, bend low, or lunge deep? Things like volleying over a net, dunking a basketball, or skating fast. Movements like these ones not only require muscular strength, but also a wide range of motion (ROM). Having higher levels of flexibility has been linked to more optimal athletic performance in explosive motions that require a greater ROM, like box-jumping. So flexibility training might just be your key to unlocking that next level of performance in motions like these.
If you’re less focused on getting to the next level of fitness, and more focused on just getting back to your sport after an injury, flexibility training is still for you. Flexibility training can potentially restore mobility in your injured muscle, ensuring symmetry in your walking, running, and overall performance. Flexibility training can also help you rehabilitate the range of motion in your injured area, so you can get back to where you were prior to your injury.
But even if you aren’t dealing with an injury, flexibility training is also important, as it’s linked to injury prevention in athletes. In particular, a dynamic stretching warm-up that gets your heart pumping and your muscles relaxed can prevent strains and tears, so your chances of having to take time off from the physical activity you love are lessened. Adding in flexibility movements that include foot-balance may be important for injury prevention as well!
If existing stiffness is keeping you from doing the sports and physical activities that make you happy, flexibility training can help, too. For example, hamstring stiffness is one of the main predictors of lumbar pain, and stretching programs have been clinically proven to reduce non-specific neck and back pain, particularly in those who spend a large portion of their day seated.
Finally, flexibility training can improve one’s mind-body connection. It’s important to note that this means stretching that is coordinated with one’s breath, and involves an awareness of sensations felt in the body. Mind-body movement such as mindful stretching is a powerful tool for everybody, including athletes. From a sport’s psychology perspective, mindful stretching can be a way to get you out of your head, and into your body so that you can quiet the internal chatter and focus on scoring the goal or landing the jump.
Interested in adding more flexibility to your training? Check out Flex Fundamentals, a flexibility training program that will help you develop a strong groundwork for your flexibility training journey.
