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Dear All,

I thought I'd post to see if it is just me or if other practitioners note the same trends, especially with children and young adults.

I see a lot of children and teenagers who play a lot of sport and do a lot of activity but are not encouraged to do stretches to warm up and cool down. As a result their musculature is causing a lot of issue.

I appreciate I may be cutting my nose of to spite my face here (private practice), but apart from contacting each individual sporting club/group how do we, as a profession, get the message out to coaches or trainers on the importance of warm ups and cool downs in preventing lower limb injuries.

Do we do anything at all for prevention or do we just treat when it comes through the door?

 

Stretching before and/or after does not reduce the risk for injury.
http://www.runnersworld.com/stretching/does-stretching-prevent-injuries?page=single
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC119442/
(and a few more recent studies).

Reminds me of what Herb Elliot's coach, the nutty Percy Cerutty said back in the 60's - he did not believe in warm ups at all. His reasoning was: rabbits can run very fast and they do not do warm ups!

 

Hi Craig, Thanks for the reply.

This confuses me as we use stretching methods for treatment of certain injuries but the evidence says that this very stretching wont reduce the risk.
Is it a case of much more investigation is required in this area. The number of variables that have to be taken into account must be huge.

The difference, personally, for cooling down vs not cooling down is massive. I guess this is why im questioning this. Then again cant argue with the evidence right in front of me...

:-s
Confused

 

Nice review of some of the literature on stretching [static] here: http://thesportsphysio.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/to-stretch-or-not-to-stretch-that-is-the-question/

 

if the link is "blocked by system administrator" is that my end? yours in being completely un-tech-savvy, mark

 

Were you trying to access from work computer? If so wordpress blocked by some as they can't guarantee content will be appropriate. All fine this end.

 

Re: Lack of warm ups/cool downs amateur sport.

Equating warm up and cool down with stretching seems very limited and limiting?

What are the other features of warm up/warm down?

What is the relative importance of these other features in comparison with stretching?

Bill