stretching the truth
I’m not a stretcher, never have been. I always seem to cut the start time too fine to stretch beforehand and I’m way too keen to get to the bar afterwards for that all-important hydration to worry about it after the event. You’d therefore think I’d be an injury waiting to happen but, as recent studies have shown, you’d be wrong. Stretching has come under quite severe pressure in recent months with all sorts of research proving that performance is inhibited if you stretch beforehand.
Whilst it’s easy to imagine a muscle having less elastic power in a stretched, supple state, research by the University of Tampa, found that when athletes stretched before a strenuous workout, they burned, on average, five percent more calories during the actual exercise. Great for weight-loss addicts then, but not so hot for performance driven athletes looking for a pb or anticipating the match to go to five. Backing this up, the same group we then asked to run as far as they could on the treadmill in 30 minutes and the non-stretchers ran almost four percent further than their stretching counterparts.
In another case of research stating the bleedin’ obvious I’ve just read an article which informed me mountain-bikers are at an increased risk of injury during the winter months. No sh*t, Sherlock.
A year’s study of 131,000 mtb’ers who visited the Glentress MTB Centre showed that 182 sustained one or more injuries which necessitated hospital attention. One third of these were fractures with men in their twenties being the most likely along with those using non-spd-clipless pedals and hardtail bikes. Apparently, men in their twenties have a tendency to bravado and silliness, non-clipless pedals mean your feet slip off the pedal and you lose control and hardtails mean you bounce all over the place on descents! Oh, and wet slippery conditions means this all happens more often.
But don’t fret just yet as researchers have come up with a couple of solutions to ease our perturbed mind and coax us back on to the slopes – wear a helmet at all times, use clip-in pedals, ride within your own ability and on a full-suss bike if downhilling, gloves are handy in keeping a grip on the bars and those in their endangered twenties might want to look in to buying lower body-armour. Phew. And someone probably got paid for this twaddle.
