Stretching Can Help Athletes -- Sometimes

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View Caption + #1: Basis Watch
Time to make up for December's bad habits by doing better in 2012.

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Get Fit: 9 Gadgets That Will Get (and Keep) You Going

Time to make up for December's bad habits by doing better in 2012. Here are the best tech tools to help you shape up and keep healthy. Who knows? You might actually keep your new year's resolution this time around. Sure, Basis can tell you time, but if you want to know your blood flow, motion, temperature, heart rate, sweat level and blood oxygen level, it'll tell you those too. With a plethora of sensors, the monitoring watch keeps an eye on your vitals, giving you an overview of health, sleep and exercise habits. Basis is an honoree for the upcoming CES Best of Innovations Design and Engineering Awards in the health and wellness category. Available for pre-order for $199. This article is part of a series about getting fit in the new year. Check out the entire Man up! feature here.

Basis

View Caption + #2: MotoActv Heart-rate Monitor

The MotoActv wants to be your personal trainer. This tiny device tells when you reach or leave your target pace, heart rate or PowerZone based on your programmed profile and goals. And to keep you going, it creates a performance playlist, pulling songs that you burned the most calories to. It also takes on a few personal assistant duties, including fetching your incoming calls and displaying on-screen text messages. Begins at $249.99.

Motorola Mobility

View Caption + #3: Withings WiFi scale

For better or worse, scales don't lie. In fact, the Withings WiFi scale tells you the cold hard truth: weight, body fat percentage, and BMI. Each time you step on, it registers these stats and sends them over your home wireless network to a private Web interface. The dashboard keeps tabs on your progress with static and interactive charts. You can share this information with your doctors, personal trainers, friends and family. If you feel so inclined, you can even tweet your progress to the entire world. Available from ThinkGeek for $164.99.

Withings

View Caption + #4: BitGym Fitness Games

The average American household has 1.15 cardio machines according to the San Francisco-based health startup BitGym. But overwhelmingly, they're left to collect dust. Get ready to use the treadmill again because BitGym's iOS games are designed to keep you going. One of them, Trail Runner, shows inspiring landscapes as you're on an exercise machine, speeding up or slowing down based on your real-life workout performance. Game prices vary, but lite versions are available for free.

BitGym

View Caption + #5: Runtastic App

If you prefer to run outdoors, Runtastic is an app that tracks your location, distance, time, pace and calorie consumption. It has charts that show your speed, altitude, pulse and training history. The pro version includes voice feedback, live tracking, cheering, pulse-reading, geotagging, workouts, competitions, and an integrated music player. Its iOS and Android apps have the most functionality, but Runtastic is also available on BlackBerry, Windows, and bada phones. Prices vary by device.

Runtastic

View Caption + #6: JayBird Freedom Earphones

The JayBird Freedom was designed for the gym rat. It uses Bluetooth connectivity, so there aren't long cords to trip over. The sound is big -- great motivation when your power track comes on. Plus, it's got enough variety of ear cushions, tips, and hooks to make sure you find the right fit; one that stays on when you're on the go.

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View Caption + #7: Fitness Technologies Underwater MP3 Player

Music can motivate runners to go longer distances, why not apply the same principle to swimmers? Generally electronics and water don't mix very well, but Fitness Technologies' UWaterK7 was built for just that. The compact waterproof MP3 player debuted in the fall and will be making an appearance at CES in January. Also expected to make an appearance: the company's line of HD waterproof action cameras and waterproof stereo Bluetooth headsets. Available for $100.

Fitness Technologies

View Caption + #8: Mophie Outdoor Battery Extender and Maps

Grab your iPhone. You're going for a hike. Not only does the mophie juice pack plus outdoor give you extended battery life (about 2,000 mAh, or eight hours of talk time on 3G), a corresponding app gives you access to 5 million square miles of high-resolution maps covering the continental U.S. and Hawaii. Once you download them, you no longer have to worry about losing reception. Plus the app records your progress, speed, distance, elevation, and geo-tagged photos. Available for $119.95.

Alice Truong for Discovery Channel

View Caption + #9: Drift HD Video Camera

A good workout doesn't always mean hitting the gym. Head somewhere beautiful and find a fun activity, like biking or snowboarding. Action cams such as the Drift HD can be a good motivator to go outside. They capture amazing moments in 1080p HD video, which, upon watching, will make you want to go right back outside again. The small, light camera can be mounted to helmets or strapped on wrists and can also be controlled remotely. A night mode also means you can record in dusty or dark conditions. Feeling motivated to get your workout on? Visit our Man up! feature, chock full of info that will get your heart pumping.

Drift HD

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After decades of fitness routines that began with lunges, toe-touches, and other stretches, the practice of static stretching before workouts has, in recent years, fallen out of favor.

Instead, driven by research suggesting that pre-exercise stretching can impair performance, many athletes now start with a warm-up followed by dynamic moves, like leg swings or drills that prepare them for the motions involved in their sport.

Now, a new review of studies adds nuance to the recommendations – as well as a reprieve for people who like the feel of a good stretch. There may be a place for static stretching after all, but only after a good warm-up and before dynamic stretching. Static stretching also appears to be most beneficial if done for short periods of time.

Here's another planet in the solar system of unexpected notions: Too much exercise can leave you flat on your back. For eternity.

“If you do around 60 seconds of static stretching and you also do dynamic stretching, you get the best of both worlds” after a good warm-up, says David Behm, an exercise physiologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. “You increase range of motion, decrease injury risk and get no change in performance.”

Stretching has become a frequent focus of scrutiny among researchers and athletes who want to maximize performance while minimizing injury risk. In particular, questions have long swirled around static stretching, which involves holding positions to the point of slight discomfort.

Debates have endured because studies have offered conflicting results. Some research has shown that static stretching can increase range of motion, in turn lowering the chances of straining muscles. But plenty of other studies have found that static stretching reduces strength, power, balance, reaction time and more. In general, there appears to be about a five percent reduction in performance when static stretching is done before an athletic test.

Still, it has been hard to draw conclusions from the large mass of stretching research, in part because of a huge range in study protocols that vary in in the kind and length of stretching, the types of measurements taken afterwards, and the timing of assessments.

Recent studies, meanwhile, have suggested that the duration of stretching may matter more than whether people stretch or not, at least when it comes to speed and strength. In a 2012 review of more than 100 studies, two researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom concluded that stretching reduced performance only when stretches went on for longer than a minute.

For the new study, Behm and colleagues wanted to take a closer look both at the amount of time spent stretching, as well as how static stretching might affect athletes in combination with other kinds of warm-up activities.

After narrowing their analysis down to 125 studies that fit their criteria, the researchers concluded that the benefits of stretching can outweigh the harms if done in a certain way. Specifically, Behm says, a workout should begin with five to 10 minutes of aerobic activity that increases core body temperature by a degree or two – enough to break a sweat.

Subsequent static stretches should last no more than 60 seconds per muscle group, and they should be followed by sport-specific dynamic stretching activities before the real work begins, the team reports in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism.

Although evidence that links stretching to injury risk is still incomplete, Behm argues that static stretching can make injuries less likely by increasing range of motion, particularly for middle-aged athletes. With short-duration stretches, he adds, performance declines are minimal.

The reason for the benefits of shorter-duration stretches, he suspects, has to do with receptors in muscles that fire when stretching begins, causing muscles to contract. As a stretch goes on and on, though, this rate of firing drops, leading to a depression of the motor system.

Even if a little stretching incurs a small loss in throwing distance or running speed, effects probably won’t matter much for the average, amateur athlete, says Michael Bergeron, president of Youth Sports of the Americas in Birmingham, Alabama. In his view, studies that try to assess the influence of stretching on sports fail to take into account all of the other factors that go into athletic performance, including the psychological impact of maintaining a certain routine or feeling a certain way.

“There are a lot of integrated inter-dependencies of biological systems that need to work together” to influence sports performance, he says. “As long as the body is being progressively prepared for activity and not being overloaded, it’s all good.”

It makes sense that stretching for shorter intervals would reduce injury risks, adds Pablo Costa, an exercise physiologist at California State University, Fullerton. But he disagrees with the conclusion that any amount of static stretching before exertion could be more good than bad.

Although the mechanism is still up for debate, he says that stretching weakens tissues and reduces strength, perhaps by increasing the time it takes for signals from the brain to reach muscles and make them contract. Even though the delay totals just milliseconds, that can add up to the difference between winning and losing for a serious athlete.

But there’s a twist that suggests timing matters, he says. Other studies have shown that chronic stretching programs done independently of exercise sessions can improve strength over the long-term.

“Based on what I have found personally, I don’t recommend that people engage in stretching prior to exercise,” Costa says. “I would leave the stretching for after exercise during the cool down period – or during a whole separate time of day for athletes who have time available.”

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