Reasons Not to Stretch

Personally I do not practice stretching. It initially started as an experiment - as in "if I don't stretch I should get hurt ?", "ok I want to test this and see precisely how much!", ie to try to evaluate the marginal value of stretching.

So far I have yet to see a negative consequence of not stretching (ie increased risk of injury, even if anecdotal experience is not very helpful)

Preparing oneself to movement is something else - you do not just immediately do something point blank, at least personally I don't - I try to "get a feeling" of the movement by performing it once or twice without any load.

Neurologically, for a computing equivalent, this acts like caching - your cerebellum is a cache for your physical movement equations (ie activate this muscle at this time, then t microseconds later this other muscle, etc)

So just performing the movement like a mime preloads the equations into the cache - basically, it makes you more efficient!

What worries me however is the amount of people you meet (ex- PT) who insist on you stretching, and who may not take no as a response - as if the refusal to stretch was just an indicative of a lack of knowledge, and therefore the superiority of their position, and that by some "moral imperative" they had to impose you the truth.

I always find that weird.

Just as with everything in life, wisdom of the crowd may not be indicative of the best way to achieve a given result.

EDIT: for those talking about post effort stretching, there is less evidence about this. Some says it prevent too much acidity from accumulating in the muscle (lactic acid), yet this same parameter in studies on weight lifters has been show to increase muscle mass and volume. Yes it may cause pain and prevent you from performing similar activity the next day, but if your goal is to maximize the health benefits on the time spent, and not just maximize the distance run or the amount of time spent running, it might be a better idea to avoid stretching, "do with" the pain, and skip practicing until you have less pain ie skip up to a week.

Overtraining exists, and just compare marathon runners to sprinters. Who visually seems the "fittest"? I'd rather look like a sprinter than a marathon runner, and also the risk of injury seems higher in distance running.

To quote Alistair Fraser, "I find teaching of science fairly easy. I have no difficulties with science education; my difficulties are with science reeducation. If I can teach something about which the students have never heard, I find that they generally both welcome and understand it. It is when I have to teach them about something that they have already learned incorrectly, that I start to identify with Sisyphus."

http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/BadScience.html

If you really start to try making hypotheses and then test them objectively, and keep an eye on your track record, it starts to become surprising that folk wisdom ever turns out to be true. A maddeningly small minority of plausible hypotheses are actually true, and confirmation bias is strong. If you haven't already, you should probably just go ahead and cut your confidence about everything you think you know in half - especially if it isn't backed by hard science.

ETA: quick Google, found one meta-study. Results:

"Trials were of poor quality and conclusions must be viewed as unreliable. The review showed that people who brush and floss regularly have less gum bleeding compared to toothbrushing alone. There was weak, very unreliable evidence of a possible small reduction in plaque. There was no information on other measurements such as tooth decay because the trials were not long enough and detecting early stage decay between teeth is difficult."

http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD008829/flossing-to-reduce-gu...

So, pretty weak evidence, though perhaps mostly from lack of trying. It can't be considered as important as brushing.

Then again, how do we know brushing is important? Time to find some other studies...