Improve Flexibility with Research-Supported Stretching Protocols | Huberman Lab Podcast #76

It turns out that having flexibility, and our ability to stretch, and the interaction between stretching and flexibility are fundamental to how we move, our ability to learn new movements, indeed also to prevent injury or repair injuries, and to offsetting and reducing inflammation throughout the body.

1. You are going to stand with legs straight, meaning knees not bent, and you are going to try and touch your toes. So try and get a sense of what your range of motion is in terms of bending over at the waist while maintaining a flat back and try to touch your toes or even touch the floor. Now what i’d like you to do is stand back up and i’d like you to contract your quadriceps as hard as you possibly can for about 5-15 seconds. (So to contract your  quadriceps you are going to extend your lower limb out.) And then now go ahead and repeat that stretch where you are trying to touch your or touch the floor. Most of you will find that you have an immediate increase in hamstring flexibility.

2. Mechanism by which interleaving push and pull (use antagonists muscles) for both strength and hypertrophy training, but also for range of motion stretching type training can allow you to achieve better results in a short period of time.

There are four types of stretching – static stretching, dynamic stretching, ballistic stretching, and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretching

3. For increasing limb range of motion it does appear that static type, including PNF, but static-type stretching is going to be more effective than dynamic and ballistic stretching.

Study from Bandy “The effect of Time and Frequency of Static Stretching on the Flexibility of the Hamstring Muscle”.

4. Holding static stretch for 30 seconds appears to be sufficient  to simulate an increase in limb range of motion over time.

Study from Ewen Thomas “The Relation Between Stretching Typology and Stretching Duration: The Effects on Range of Motion”.

5. We need to get at least five minutes per week of static stretching per muscle group.

6.  We need to divide that five minutes into sets of 30 seconds each. It does seem important that the  frequency of stretching practice distributed throughout the week is important.

We should probably be doing anywhere from two to four sets of 30 second static hold stretches five days per week or some variant thereof.

7. Raising one’s core body temperature by a bit by doing 5-10 minutes of easy cardiovascular exercise or calisthenic movements, provided you can do those without getting injured, seems to be an ideal way to warm up the body for stretching.

8. Feel the muscles as you stretch them, don’t just go through the motions.

Don’t get so attached to being able to always achieve, for instance, a stretch of a given distance within a given session.

Article “Comparison of Two Stretching Modalities on Lower-Limb Range of Motion Measurements in Recreational Dancers”

9. A six-week training program using very low-intensity stretching had a greater positive effect on lower limb range of motion than did moderate-intensity static stretching.

So very low-intensity stretching, meaning effort that feels not painful and in fact might even feel easy or at least not straining to exceed a given range of motion, turns out to not just be as effective, but more effective than moderate-intensity stretching.

Study from Helene Langevin “Stretching Reduce Tumor Growth in a Mouse Breast Cancer Model”

Article “Insular Cortex Mediates Increased Pain Tolerance in Yoga Practitioners”.