By Dr. Marco Martone
Along with strength and endurance, the development of good flexibility, or joint mobility, is also an essential component of motor performance. In bodybuilding, as in all power sports, in recent years the development of flexibility has gained more and more space in the annual programming, so it has become a real must for athletic training, not to mention the benefits one has on the competition stage in terms of greater elegance in proposing the classic poses without showing a clumsy appearance; indeed when you attend a competition you could easily realize who is stretching and who is not.
One of the most renowned scientists in the environment, Dr. Tudor O. Bompa, a scholar of human performance and a strong advocate of periodization to build power and muscle mass, states in his book "Serious Strentgh Training" that: "Before developing muscle strength in a particular muscle sector, the flexibility of this sector ". This is because the development of good joint mobility can both increase performance in terms of strength, power and muscle mass and be considered a sort of joint insurance in the game.
Let's first talk about the possibility of increasing performance and muscle recovery through the use of stretching, therefore with the acquisition of greater joint mobility. To do this, I need you to understand the constitution of muscle fiber.
Within each muscle fiber there are smaller units called myofibrils, in turn each myofibril is composed of a series of units known as sarcomeres. In each sarcomere we find the thick filaments called myosin and the thinner ones called actin; these filaments, both thick and thin, are located on separate paths but parallel to each other and slightly overlapping. Actin and myosin are considered the real contractile proteins in the sense that they are responsible for muscular contractions, in fact it is the actin slippage, therefore its superimposition on the myosin to determine the shortening of the sarcomere, thus determining the muscular contraction . If in the contraction the actin filaments overlap with those of myosin, in the elongation the opposite occurs and that is a structural elongation of the fibers due to the fact that each sarcomere extends to the point where there is no longer any overlap. Precisely this condition, according to some studies, would determine the possibility of increasing muscle performance.
  From: www.sci.sdsu.edu/movies/actin_myosin.html |  |
In particular, a research conducted in some London universities has confirmed that after periods of prolonged muscle stretching the body perceives the reduction of the overlap between actin and myosin and re-synthesizes new sarcomeres in the final part of myofilaments so as to re-establish the quantities of actin and myosin overlaps within each sarcomere. It is clear that a greater overlap results in a potential production of force majeure. Another important finding that emerges from studies on joint flexibility is that performance is better also because lower muscle rigidity increases the potential for using the elastic components of muscle groups.
I bet you felt like stretching, but it's also important to know when it's done. In fact it is not the same thing to do it before or after the workout, indeed it can be deleterious if done before because it has been shown that it can make you lose a percentage of strength. Studies on joint mobility confirm instead that performing stretching exercises at the end of the workout is the best choice because it accelerates recovery processes; in fact, after training a muscle is slightly shorter than its anatomical length and, considering that to regenerate, and therefore to compensate, it must necessarily return to its natural length, the stretching performed after the workout brings the muscle length back to its optimum accelerating in this so important recovery processes.
CONTINUE: Part Two »
