Stretching Is Training

Back in 2010 I read Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove’s The New Rules of Lifting. Good book. It pushed back hard on stretching, arguing it didn’t improve mobility, didn’t reduce pain, and that strength training built range of motion just as well. For a lot of people in the industry at the time, that framing worked as a permission slip to stop doing something they’d never fully bought into anyway.

I understood the argument then and I still do. But I think it threw the baby out with the bathwater, and the industry has spent the better part of two decades overcorrecting in both directions. Half the field dismisses stretching outright. The other half treats it like a fix for things it was never capable of fixing.

The real issue isn’t that stretching doesn’t work. It’s that almost nobody treats it like training.

What stretching can and can’t do

A 2021 meta-analysis compared strength training to stretching for improving joint range of motion and found them roughly equivalent. (1) That finding gets passed around a lot, but the nuance usually gets dropped: a lot of the studies in that review were incomplete or methodologically thin. “Roughly equivalent” is carrying more weight than it should in that sentence.

What the research actually supports is narrower. Stretching can reduce muscle tension at length. It can expand passive range of motion, which is the ceiling of how far a joint travels when something external moves it. And there’s reasonable evidence it improves the sensory quality of connective tissue, which has downstream effects on how a joint senses and organizes itself. (4)

What it can’t do is lengthen muscle in any permanent structural sense, reliably prevent injury, or replace strength work inside a range. None of that is me freelancing. The pre-workout side of this is also worth saying plainly: several studies show static stretching before training can blunt power and performance, especially when holds run long. (2)(3) That’s not an argument against stretching. It’s an argument for understanding context.

The question isn’t “does stretching work”

Most of the confusion comes from treating stretching as one thing. It isn’t. Dynamic stretching takes a joint through its range actively. Static stretching holds a lengthened position with no muscular engagement. PNF loads the tissue while it’s long. Loaded progressive work like PAILs and RAILs applies isometric force at end range to build strength and control there.

These have different mechanisms, different time costs, and different uses. Asking “does stretching work” without naming which one and for what is a little like asking “does exercise work.” The honest answer is that it depends on what you’re after, who you are, and how you’re applying it, and the internet can’t answer any of those for you.

Almost nobody does the actual dose

Say your hip flexor is adaptively short from years of sitting and you want more usable hip extension. A two-minute passive hold with some intent is moving the needle, but probably less than you think. FRC’s guidance is somewhere in the range of two to fifteen minutes in a lengthened position to drive real change. (5) Don’t quote me on the exact ceiling, but the point stands: most people sink into a stretch for ninety seconds, feel a little looser, and call it done. Then they wonder why nothing has changed after months of the same thing.

There’s a second piece almost everyone skips. The tissue needs to be loaded after it’s been placed in a new range. You can expand a range passively and still not own it, meaning your nervous system won’t let you access it under load or speed or in a moment that actually counts. Passive range and active range are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a lot of injuries live. Stretching that only ever stretches leaves you sitting in that gap.

Treat it like everything else you train

This is the part I think the industry mostly gets wrong. Stretching gets filed as its own category with its own rules, separate from the rest of training. It isn’t. The same variables that govern everything else (load, duration, intensity, frequency, volume, progression) all apply.

If you progressively overload your squat but never progressively overload your stretching, you aren’t treating them the same. You’re hoping one responds to training principles while the other responds to good intentions.

Specificity matters just as much. The right approach depends on the tissue, the joint, the goal, and the person. A generic stretch you saw posted online isn’t a prescription. It might be right for you. It might do nothing. It might quietly reinforce a compensation you already have. You can’t know without context, and that’s exactly the thing a video can’t give you.

What works is applying stretching with the same intent you’d bring to anything else: a clear goal, appropriate load and duration, progressive challenge over time, and strength work in the range you just opened up. Do that and stretching stops being something you do to feel better for an afternoon. It becomes something that changes what your tissue can actually do.

That’s a harder sell than a thirty-second hip flexor stretch. It’s also the version that works.

If you’ve been stretching consistently and still feel stuck, the problem usually isn’t the stretching itself. It’s that the protocol was never matched to what your body actually needs. Figuring that out is what an assessment is for.

References

1. Strength Training versus Stretching for Improving Range of Motion: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
2. Time to Move From Mandatory Stretching: We Need to Differentiate “Can I?” From “Do I Have To?”
3. Acute Effects of Static Stretching on Muscle Strength and Power: An Attempt to Clarify Previous Caveats
4. The Architecture of the Connective Tissue in the Musculoskeletal System: An Often Overlooked Functional Parameter as to Proprioception in the Locomotor Apparatus
5. Current Concepts in Muscle Stretching for Exercise and Rehabilitation

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