For the love of God, stop stretching!
I’ve heard it so many times; “oh I’m very stiff, I need to stretch more often, I am not very flexible”. Yeah, yeah I know, I know. You probably searched YouTube and found some fairy princess that told you in a calming voice to open your chakras as you struggle to grasp your own bleedin’ toes at the bottom of a sun salutation. It can all be a bit fruitless if your toes never seem to come any closer and your hamstrings continue to scream at you. Maybe it’s time to try a new method.
I don’t mean to burst bubbles, but your flexibility doesn’t mean much. I can tie the stereotypical 3 sessions-a-week yogi into a pretzel but I wouldn’t trust him to run a 5 kilometre mini marathon without getting a stitch. Nor to deadlift more than his bag of ethically sourced almond flour. Yogis have always seemed to me like the wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube man from Family Guy. Legs, limbs and Lululemons flying about without any intelligent sense of motor control, joint stability or above all, strength.
But I feel better after stretching?
Yes I am sure you do, but then again, you probably haven’t had much experience in what a good weightlifting session can do for your pain levels and posture. Also, stretching will merely give short term relief and never long term results. That’s the importance of strength in athletic performance.
Take deadlifting, correctly performed, as an example. With each rep you’ll stretch your hamstrings, loaded with your additional weight of the bar or dumbbells, to its full range of motion. Not only will you perform this hinge many more times in a weightlifting session than a yoga or stretching session, but it will be much heavier and more beneficial than simply hinging and touching your ever elusive toes. With deadlifting you will build muscle, burn calories, improve posture, strengthen your bones and joints and reduce your risk of injury by a staggering amount and your toes will come ever closer to you when you do choose to drop in for a quick yoga session.
So the question arises, why salute the sun if you can just deadlift maybe twice a month. It seems to me that in this instance, deadlifting can improve the length of your hamstring, but yoga doesn’t seem to help your deadlift?
Choose your exercises wisely, your time is limited. Some exercises will have a greater return on investment than others. That’s not to say that one exercise is better than all the rest, (it’s squatting by the way), but to say that some exercises and forms of training are not as physically beneficial as others.
Moral of the story, lift weights to win at yoga. Be careful though, they just might not like you for it.
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