To Stretch or Not to Stretch? The Answer Is Elastic

They’re like one of my running partners, Claire Brown, a 35-year-old triathlete. “I always feel like, well, athletes should do yoga,” Claire said. “It’s supposed to be really good for running, and when I do it regularly, it does loosen up my hips and make me feel better for running.” Yet she puts off going to yoga. “It shouldn’t feel like an obligation, but it always does,” Claire said. “The good classes are often an hour and a half long, and I’m thinking: ‘I could be running, I could be biking. But here I am, stretching and breathing.’ “Isn’t it funny, though, that something that should be calming can actually cause stress because you think you have to do it?” For the bottom line on stretching, there is an official government review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in the March 2004 issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Its conclusion, that the research to date is inadequate to answer most stretching questions, still holds. The best that Dr. Julie Gilchrist, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and one of the study’s authors, can offer is a few guidelines and observations about why studies have yet to answer the stretching questions...NYT