Editorials
Reducing risk of injury due to exercise
Stretching before exercise does not help
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
It used to be so simple. Prevention of
musculoskeletal injury during exercise meant conditioning, warm up, and
stretching. We could not argue with these basic principles
until we
began to look for the evidence to support such advice. Stretching is long established as one of the fundamental principles in athletic care.
No competition is complete without countless athletes throwing shapes
along the trackside, trainers and coaches each favouring their own
particular exercises, and locker room experts, kinesiologists, and self
appointed specialists inventing new contortions for long forgotten
muscle groups. Sport is rife with pseudoscience, and it is difficult to
disentangle the evangelical enthusiasm of the locker room from research
evidence. But in this issue, Herbert and Gabriel (see p 468) question
conventional wisdom and conclude that stretching before exercising does
not reduce the risk of injury or muscle soreness.1
They are not the first group to examine the evidence
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- Effects of stretching before and after exercising on muscle soreness and risk of injury: systematic review
- Rob D Herbert and Michael Gabriel
BMJ 2002 325: 468.[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
Rapid Responses:
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- Music to my ears
- Dr Leszek Piechowski
bmj.com, 30 Aug 2002 [Full text] - Stretching Before Exercise Old Wives Tale
- Dominic J Shields
bmj.com, 31 Aug 2002 [Full text] - Good News, but...
- Catherine Treece
bmj.com, 1 Sep 2002 [Full text] - Stretching is not warm-up !
- Axel Ellrodt
bmj.com, 2 Sep 2002 [Full text] - What is evidence?
- Antonio Lopez-Peņa
bmj.com, 6 Sep 2002 [Full text]
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