The fundamental mistake in stretching is thinking you will gain something from it. You might in fact have something to gain from stretching, but your thinking obscures the actual stretching experience, the clarity of which is essential to proper practice.
A gaining idea throws you into the future, where your ambition resides. Unbridled ambition leads to excessive effort, and often then to injury. Remaining in the present enables you to focus on exerting the right amount of effort, free of gainful ambition.
During a right-effort stretch, there is no thought of what you might gain from the stretching activity. Rather, when a gaining thought occurs, desire attaches to it, driving your ambition towards perdition. But since there isn’t the felt impetus to gain anything with right-effort, you aren’t tempted to press into discomfort with a stretch. Discomfort, even tolerable discomfort, not only reveals wrong intention. It’s unnecessary to the stretching project, which should be ancillary to the sport of long-distance racing.
It often seemed to me in the 1980s that Runners World Magazine had as many articles on stretching as training. Did stretching make us faster marathoners by, for instance, lengthening our stride? If stretching didn’t make us faster, why stretch? Here are two reasons: 1) reduce stress-induced muscle twitchiness and 2) enable limbs to extend to their full range of motion, without discomfort. If you lie in bed after a hard workout and some of your leg muscles spasm slightly, stretching will quell the spasms.
Similarly, if you feel pain as your legs approach full range (bending over to touch your toes, for instance), gentle movement stretching will reduce that discomfort. But it won’t necessarily increase your stride length. Developing a longer stride is a laudable goal, but building muscle power with hill training will do that without risking damage to the muscle, tendon, and ligament structures that determine range of motion. Besides, running like a gazelle might look good, but it doesn’t make one an efficient marathoner.
“Is anyone here into pain? Of course not! Yet, our actions are often consistent with a ‘No Pain, No Gain’ attitude. Better to temper one’s ambition with play.”
The best runners might be very flexible, but they were probably that way from birth. Which brings us back to the stretching project. Runners World used to publish articles on avoiding injury through stretching, while also saying that most marathoners—even those that stretched—got injured several times a year. Could runners hurt them-selves by stretching? Well, either that or with excessive training and racing effort.
An associate of mine in the early 1980s used to give talks on stretching to runners. I don’t recall a word Mickey said, but I’ll never forget his visual aid. He used to hold the ends of a foot-long, colored rubber band, stretching it constantly during his talks. The activity was mesmerizing. Which was part of his point: constant stretching was necessary so the body could get used to it, and gain from it.
Mickey was a happy guy. He smiled as he talked, which conveyed yet another point: stretching should be enjoyable. Who would persist in stretching through discom-fort or outright pain? Is anyone here into pain? Of course not! Yet, our actions are often consistent with a “no pain; no gain” attitude. Better to temper one’s ambition with play.