Video Transcript

Hi, this is Lisa with danceypantsfitness.com, here at Anytime Fitness, South Longview, Texas. What is the difference between stretching in the warm up and the cool down? There has been a big return to static stretching in both the warm up and the cool down. What do I mean by static stretching? There's lots of different variations, I'll just show you one. If I'm about to workout my quadriceps and maybe I want to warm up my quadriceps, I can go down, push my knee to the floor, tilt my pelvis underneath and now I'm feeling the stretch right here in the quadriceps. If I hold this 20 to 30 seconds, this is a static stretch. I'm not going anywhere. The thinking is that when the muscle is warmed and you only stretch at the very end during the cool down and not at the beginning at all, that that muscle is actually stretching but then returning to its original position so that you're not really getting the benefits of flexibility. So, we want to put static stretch at the beginning of the workout as well. So, there's a progression. The very first thing you want to do is to decrease the density of the muscle. Muscles are more prone to injury when they are more dense. So, there's a few ways to do this. You can actually use a foam roller to roll that on the muscles that you're about to workout. Or you can use some tennis balls and rub it on the muscles. So, if I'm working my lower body, maybe I would take a few, a couple of tennis balls and I would just roll it on my quadriceps, roll it on my hamstrings and my gluts. We, what we're wanting to do is workout the trigger points or the hot spots that can actually cause injury. Then, you would go into your static stretching. So, again, if I'm working lower body, this is a common one that everybody knows, I'm stretching my quadricep; I could hold this for 20 to 30 seconds. I would do the same thing with the other leg and I would repeat about three times per muscle group, holding that static stretch 20 to 30 seconds. Then, you would go into your dynamic stretching or your dynamic warm up. A dynamic stretch is where you are stretching the muscle, but you're actually moving. So, an example, just a simple example would be something like this. I'm stretching out my calf muscle, maybe I'm alternating, but I'm not holding it. It's not a static stretch, it's a dynamic stretch. Then, you would go into your workout and you would stretch a little bit at the end as well. And that's a little bit about the difference between in the warm up and the cool down.