Admit it.  You don’t actually stretch enough.  

Improved athletic performance –

You may not realise this, but stretching before you work out can actually greatly improve your athletic performance and your recovery rates.

The reason for this is that stretching has been proven to increase your blood circulation within your body.

This increase in blood flow means that more blood is able to be transported to your muscles.

This is vital because blood supplies the muscles, or rather the cells within the muscles, with oxygen, nutrients, and energy which makes them for efficiency.

The more blood that is able to be supplied to the muscles, the more efficient they will become, meaning the better you will perform athletically.

If you are unfortunate enough to suffer from a painful muscle or joint injury, another great benefit is that the increased oxygen being supplied via the blood, can speed up the healing and recovery process, allowing you to recover from injuries much quicker.

Better posture –

You may not realise it, but stretching can also help to improve your posture, which, although you might not have noticed, can actually be harming your athletic performance, not to mention your joints in the process.

Stretching helps to greatly loosen your muscles and your muscle tissue, which is so important because tight and stiff muscles are often the root cause of poor posture.

Poor posture not only makes you look shorter, but more seriously, it also leads to pain in the back and shoulders.

Stretching before and after a workout can help to improve your posture, making you look taller and helping to alleviate pain in the back, neck and shoulders.

Improved flexibility –

One of the main benefits associated with stretching, both before and after a workout, is the fact that it has been proven on multiple occasions to improve your flexibility substantially.

Basically, think of flexibility as to the extent in which your muscle fibres will lengthen.

As we grow older, or become less active, these muscles grow tighter and shorter, which greatly restricts flexibility and makes even the most trivial of tasks such as straightening your legs or bending down to tie your shoelaces, a painful and difficult ordeal.

Stretching regularly, however, has been proven to extend these muscle tissues and fibres, improve their elasticity and improve your flexibility as a result.

Try a few weeks of stretching daily for a few minutes each day, especially before and after a workout, and you’ll be amazed by just how more flexible you become over a relatively short amount of time.

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