Huberman Summary: How and Why Stretch
On Monday 6/13, Andrew Huberman, PHD, published his overview of what we currently know about Flexibility and stretching.
I always prioritize Andrew Huberman’s weekly science of the body podcast, but this weeks’ was especially juice as a yoga teacher. He does a full lit review of all the latest science on stretching and gives us the mechanisms behind why they work. Several shocking new research has come out about the benefits of yoga. I highly recommend everyone listen to the whole thing, but you can also use the YouTube sections to listen to just the parts about Yoga.
I’ve summarized it here. Enjoy! If you enjoy this type of content please subscribe to my newsletter and my YouTube.
Just the facts:
As we age we lose 10% of our flexibility each 10 years. This is not necessarily a linear regression.
Loss of flexibility can cause many issues including loss of balance, injury, inability to do the normal things that life requires.
Being able to stretch is critical to prevent injury in regular life and in performance of anything strenuous.
Stretching can be defined in 4 ways: Dynamic, ballistic, static and, PNF.
To maintain and increase flexibility the best protocol was the following: For each muscle, statically stretch 30 to 40% of max (max is when the stretch hurts) for 3 or 4 sets 30 seconds five times a week or 60 seconds every other day. The total for each muscle should be 5 minutes per week.
It’s important to be present with your current range of motion vs trying to always hit some baseline and then push from there.
The NIH funded research that showed that 10 minutes of stretching in mice with breast cancer for 3 weeks reduced the size of their tumors by 50%: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-26198-7
Yoga improved the student’s brain volume and increased their ability to tolerate pain: https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/24/10/2732/307000?login=true
Static Stretching before a performance is probably not good as it saps the energy from the muscle and will reduce performance. Dynamic stretching is good before a performance to warm up the muscle.
The episode covers the mechanisms that create the movements.
