Stretching exercises: improve flexibility, shape the body and prevent injuries

Section 2 Stretching Exercises

Stretching is part of fitness. Through stretching exercises, you can reduce the possibility of injury and make your muscles and joints more flexible.

Tensioning is divided into active tensioning and passive tensioning.

Active stretching, as the name suggests, involves controlling the contraction and stretching of muscles through conscious effort, without using any external force to maintain the muscles in a certain state.

Active stretching can improve muscle contraction strength and enhance flexibility when performing movements.

Passive stretching is the process of using external force to help your limbs be in a stretched state.

As a slow and relaxing form of stretching, it can help relieve muscle excitability after exercise and reduce tension in the nervous system.

Therefore, passive stretching after training is a way to relax both the body and mind at the same time.

Understanding stretching and its benefits

I can tell you definitively that stretching exercises can also help us lose fat.

Long-term stretching exercises can effectively improve body flexibility.

Flexibility is also one of the indicators of our body's comprehensive training. I believe that everyone has done the sit-and-reach test in the physical fitness test during their school days. Compared with physical indicators such as cardiopulmonary function (lung capacity), muscle explosive power and muscle endurance, people usually do not pay special attention to body flexibility.

If everyone knew that flexibility could effectively help with fat loss and body shaping, they might pay more attention to flexibility training.

It's important to know that flexibility isn't exclusive to dancers and gymnasts; with training, you too can achieve their graceful physique.

An excellent athlete needs to excel in every aspect of physical ability. Even in a sport like boxing, which emphasizes speed, strength, and explosiveness, athletes need to train their dodging and movement skills. It's not enough to just have brute force to win a match.

The same principle applies to fat loss. It requires a combination of abilities in many aspects. By improving our overall exercise capacity, the fat loss effect will naturally become more and more outstanding.

Stretching improves our flexibility, thereby enhancing the standard of our movements and achieving better fat loss results.

Although stretching exercises cannot directly accelerate fat burning, they improve flexibility and enhance the accuracy and completion of movements, thus multiplying the training effect.

Proper form of movement recruits more muscles. The more muscles involved in the exercise, the more energy is burned, the larger the calorie deficit, and the greater the fat loss effect.

Therefore, stretching exercises can help us lose weight.

Before physical education class, the physical education teacher often leads the students to twist their necks and stretch their legs, in order to prevent injuries.

Another benefit of stretching exercises is that they can effectively reduce the probability of injury.

Good exercise habits need to be cultivated.

During the fat loss process, we need to establish our own exercise cycle. After all, fat is something we eat one bite at a time, and it's unrealistic to expect to lose it all at once.

For a healthy person, a fat loss exercise cycle is about 12 weeks.

If you have a higher starting weight, there may be a period of time when your weight does not change significantly. However, once you break through this plateau, you will see your weight drop rapidly over the next 12 weeks.

However, the two worst things about exercising to lose weight are illness and injury.

Many people blindly adjust their diet without proper guidance, resulting in insufficient intake of nutrients and decreased immunity.

Although you'll be happy to see your weight drop rapidly during this period, once you get sick and stop exercising, you'll regain your weight by supplementing your nutrition through food and recovering from your illness.

Most people would become discouraged at this point and give up the idea of ​​continuing to lose weight.

Another reason why your weight loss plan might fail is injury.

Everyone knows that running can help you lose weight. Since you decided to lose weight, you can be seen running diligently on the school playground, the garden downstairs in your community, and the treadmill in the gym. However, if you don't pay attention to stretching and relaxing, your knees will soon give out, and you will have to stop your weight loss plan.

Stretching exercises improve our flexibility, enhance the range of motion of our joints, and promote the secretion of synovial fluid to protect our joints.

Increased joint range of motion reduces the risk of injury, which is the fundamental guarantee for weight loss through exercise.

Many women are afraid that working out will make their limbs bulky. In our Asian perspective, we still think that long legs and slender arms are more attractive.

Actually, compared to men, it is more difficult for women to build muscle. However, learning to do the correct stretching exercises can also help shape the body and make our posture more upright and slender.

Stretching exercises stimulate muscles, accelerate blood and oxygen supply, relax muscles, and improve flexibility.

Most women lose weight to achieve a good figure so they look good in any clothes, not simply to see the number on the scale drop while their friends don't notice any change.

Many modern women wear high heels for long periods of time due to their professions, which can lead to their calves becoming more and more developed, turning into muscular, thick calves, which is indeed not aesthetically pleasing.

Therefore, even without exercising, doing some muscle stretching exercises during your free rest time can still help improve your leg shape.

All the training we do, whether aerobic or anaerobic, will increase our muscle mass, that is, increase our muscle size.

If you don't stretch and relax, the trained areas will become thicker and stronger, especially for women. If they don't stretch and relax their legs after aerobic exercises like running or using an elliptical machine, their muscles will remain congested, making them more prone to clumping, which will make their legs look less attractive.

However, stretching does not prevent muscle growth.

Taking leg muscles as an example, the purpose of stretching is to make them thinner and longer as you want them to be, rather than wider and thicker.

However, training is also phased, and only by persisting in it over a long period of time will the effects become more and more obvious.

Don't stop exercising just because you see your legs getting a little thicker. Use a foam roller to roll and relax your legs, and combine it with stretching exercises.