UKC

I've come across this twice recently, and was wondering whether anyone knew why?

Apparently you shouldn't stretch your forearms during a climbing session, only at the end. I couldn't find any reasoning and I was curious.

Any ideas?

In reply to Rob Laird:

Static stretching apparently takes power out of the muscles. You should just do some dynamic stretching and warm up on the wall.

In reply to Pete Dangerous:

Yep, there are studies showing that static stretching temporarily weakens the stretched muscles, so definitely a bad idea for warm-ups.

Personally I just warm up on easy routes at the crag/wall, and do my stretching/mobility stuff separately.

In reply to Rob Laird:

Cheers

I normally warm up with easy routes too, but sometimes I stretch when I feel a bit pumped, but I think I will leave it for now...

In reply to Rob Laird:
My understanding (probably poor) is that muscles have some special fibres that when stretched suddenly beyond a certain point basically result in the muscle contracting to protect itself from injury by over stretching. Static stretching (esp if holding over 15s) stretches all these fibres slowly allowing you to stretch the muscle in a controlled way which results in flexibility gains without injury.

When you stretch the muscle before working out in the above way you are basically leaving it more prone to injury during the climbing session as the fibres have been stretched and therefore the muscle will delay to contract to protect itself should it be stretched and thus might stretch to the point where injury occurs.

Dynamic stretching but also mainly mobility exercises are best before climbing. Static stretching is best done after and the idea there is that it speeds up recovery but also, maintains/improves flexibility (every time you work out a muscle intensively, I think it heals a little bit shorter than before unless you stretch).

Apologies if all the above are inaccurate, just my understanding...

In reply to Rob Laird:
Pete Dangerous and Alan Little are both correct, but I'd like to expand a little (based on a huge amount of reading for a relevant degree in the near past):

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that static stretching is indeed not recommended prior to exercise for MOST sports, as it has been proven to reduce the maximal force that the prime-movers can generate. The exception to this is climbing, where some LIGHT stretching does reduce the maximal 'potential' force but increases the maximal force that the prime movers can generate in a much wider range of non-optimal positions - like virtually every climbing move. Light static stretching is still recommended after exercise.

I hope that helps. Apologies that I haven't got the references to the research literature at hand, but there are enough search strings there to expand/confirm pretty quickly.

Please note that it is important to consider all the muscle groups you use when climbing and not just the forearms.

Regards,

Sven
info@summitmountaineering.com

In reply to Sven:

There some references here: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/reasons-not-to-stretch/?_php=true&...