? about my Center

CoachK,

Alot of our younger guys have limited hip flexibility. On a daily basis our DC has them do parellel squats with a broom stick above their head.

J.C. - I always though that weights is the answer.

This might sound like the "old-timer" that I am, but I was never into stretching as a coach or a player. My experience has been that a kid is flexible, or he isn't. I found extensive flexibilities to be a waste of time. Bugel won't do them with the O-Line, preferring certain DRILLS (below). Another thing - Sports Trainers & Ortho Surgeons are now pushing the notion that certain stretches are HARMFUL ("Hurdler's Stretch"; "Double Leg Lift With Straight Legs"; "Standing Toe-Touch"; " Full Sit Up"; "Neck Circles"; ETC. = on their "HIT LIST" )!!!! Next thing you know - you'll be sued for using them. I subscribe to the following theories:

1. "A bank robber never stretches before holding up the bank - yet there is no record of a bank robber pulling a muscle running from the cops"!!!!

2. "A dog never stretches before chasing a cat! Ever see a dog pull a muscle chasing a cat"??

Drills Bugel prefers to stretching:

JOE BUGEL — OFFENSIVE LINE DRILLS (REDSKINS)

"FOUR CORNERS" = Better warm up drill that stretching. For a guy who is stiff — improves feet. Go ¾ speed. Put 4 cones at the corners of a square — 10 yds. apart. Teaches how to run (over exaggerate arm pump) . Go forward-lateral-backward-lateral. RUN to first cone & come under control — SHUFFLE to next cone (with a slight stagger of L foot if going L & R foot if going R) in a bridge position (sit down & bend, with a wide base — bridge neck — keep hands up - be sure to SHUFFLE — not gallop). BACKPEDAL — then SHUFFLE again. NOTE: Your feet can move TOO fast in pass pro).

"SHUFFLE DRILL" (pass pro) = Break down in good "football position" — wide base — don't worry about speed. Shuffle to lines - 5 yds. — 10 yds. — 5 yds. When changing directions at line - don't stop & plant to change — keep on balance — keep wide base — don't gallop or get crossed over.

"STRAIGHT LINE DRILL" (like the Secondary's "Run the Line" drill) = Straddle line — run backwards — coach waves off & he turns hips keeping eyes on coach. Everything in football is usually below the waist — "you block with your feet". Teach stiff kid how to turn — break down & stay low, working feet & hips.

"BAG DRILL" = Over the bags — another shuffle drill. Keep hands up — neck in bridge position — back & forth, back & forth, & break. NOTE: How you FINISH any drill is important — put towel 15 yds. downfield & he has to break on ball to towel.

"UP & BACK DRILL" (4 bags in a straight line) = Back-shuffle-forward-shuffle (moving feet) — up & back, up & back. Don't go 100 MPH — concentrate on moving feet quick - keeping shoulders square — moving in a good "football position".

"SOFTBALL DRILL" = Used to teach big man to bend at knees — go down & pick up object where you have to use hand & eye coordination to see it (moving target). Use an area with 2 cones 10 yds. apart. Roll softball to farthest point of cone — he runs shuffles laterally & he has to bend knees with both hands down — pick up ball with both hands & throw it to coach. Coach then rolls it to the other farthest point. Direction drill where big guy has to bend & pick it up. GOOD CONDITIONER.

Quote

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Originally posted by: Oneback
Good recent article in Richmond Times-Dispatch by Dr. Paul G. Donahue = "STRETCHING EXERCISES ARE OVERRATED". Can't quote the whole article but he says: "More and more evidence indicates that the belief that stretching is mandatory holds no water. It does not prevent injuries. (That information comes from training Army recruits). It has little influence on muscle performance. It does not warm body tissues. I have abandoned it."

He goes on to say: "Warm-ups are not the same as stretches. Jogging is an example of a warm-up."

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Nice post, Coach Bill. Do you have a link for the article?

I've always believed that it does not do a whole lot of good to stretch a cold muscle. Before stretching, do some kind of a dynamic warmup (an activity that raises body temperature and starts a little sweat going). We do the BFS Dot Drill before we stretch.

Is this kid fit or fat? If he has a lot of bodyfat, that may contribute to his inflexibility.

If your center is really tight-jointed and inflexible in the hip area, you might want to consider a PNF (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation) routine. This is a flexibility program in which a partner will apply resistance for the player who is stretching.

any drill that works the hip flexors would be adviced. Coach CAmpbell

This is recent:

By DR. PAUL DONOHUE
Syndicated Columnist

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DEAR DR. DONOHUE: I am a runner with tight hamstring muscles. What kind of stretching can I do to loosen them? I have had one pulled hamstring injury and don't want another. -- R.D.

ANSWER: At this very moment, there is a controversy raging about the usefulness of stretching. From Australia comes a report that failed to show that stretching before exercise or sports participation contributes anything to injury reduction or performance enhancement. Another study claims that stretching before an athletic event somehow diminishes muscle strength.

No offense intended to anyone of a different view, but there is no way I'm putting an athlete on the field of play without first having stretched properly. All these so called "Expert Physicians" in all the different specialities in medicine today, are the ones who just a short time ago was prescribing medicines that we now know precipitate heart attack, stroke, hemmorage and all the rest. The major manufactures of these drugs are being sued on a daily basis for causing irreversable damage to heart, lungs, kidneys, etc.
I'm 63, 41 years of coaching experience, and this is one area I don't plan on changing. We are in the midst of off season training (weight lifting, cardiovascular and conditioning regimens) and we stretch just after heating the muscle with blood flow that has been elevated by jogging a lap when outside, by aroebics when inside, before we ever put the first plate on the bar! I'm certainly not a Wille Lowman type (couldn't adapt to modern methods) but they will have to do a lot more research in this area to convince me to change. JMO.

Coach Easton

MORE REPORTS THAT HAVE COME OUT RECENTLY. THEY BEAR OUT MY EXPERIENCES AS A PLAYER AND COACH (OVER 40 YEARS):

I. Workouts: Does Stretching Help?

Emily Sohn

Touch your toes. Reach for the sky. Twist from side to side.

If you've ever played on a sports team or gone to gym class,
you probably know the drill. First, you do some warmups. Then
you stretch. Exercises and activities follow. At the end of
class or practice, you do more stretches.

For decades, coaches and gym teachers have insisted that
stretching helps athletes perform better, suffer fewer
injuries, and feel less sore the next day. From the health club
to the football field to the gymnastics mat, everywhere you
look, people stretch.

Is stretching before soccer as helpful as just jogging or doing
some other sorts of warmups?

Now, research suggests that stretching may not do your body as
much good as people thought. After reviewing more than 350
scientific studies, researchers from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) found that stretching may not
reduce the chance of injury.

"There's insufficient evidence to demonstrate that stretching
is effective," says Stephen Thacker. He's director of the CDC's
epidemiology program in Atlanta, Ga.

Athletic performance

If it's athletic performance you're after, don't expect
stretching to help you run faster, jump higher, or throw a ball
farther, either. Some studies show that stretching may actually
slow you down, especially if you do it before you play your
sport.

To top it off, it now looks as if stretching may actually make
you even more likely to get hurt, says Stacy Ingraham.

Ingraham is an exercise physiologist at the University of
Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research focuses on injuries in
women and girls, who tend to hurt their muscles and joints more
often than men do.

"Certain athletes stretch all the time," Ingraham says.
"They're the ones who usually get hurt."

Ingraham points to professional baseball players as an example.
They all do stretches before a game, she says. Yet baseball
players have one of the highest rates of injury in any sport.
Minnesota Twins center fielder Torii Hunter tore his hamstring
in his first game of the season.

Ingraham has coached and worked with runners, basketball
players, baseball players, and football players. When she
persuades them to stop stretching, she says, injury rates tend
to go down.

Thacker has noticed a similar pattern. He coaches a high school
girl's basketball team. During his first 5 years of coaching,
six girls tore their ACL, a ligament that connects the thigh to
the shin and stabilizes the knee. Three years ago, Thacker
replaced stretching with specific strengthening exercises and
warm-up activities such as jogging and sidestepping. Since
then, the team has had no ACL injuries.

Working muscles

To understand why stretching may be a bad idea, it helps to
know how muscles work.

It all starts as orders from the brain. Special cells called
neurons carry electrical messages from the brain through the
nervous system to the muscles you want to activate. If you're
running, your brain tells your legs to move and your arms to
pump. As soon as the messages get to their targets, the muscles
react. You're cruising.

How muscles are attached to bones at the knee.

Skeletal muscles are the kind that attach to bones. They do
most of the work when you exercise. Skeletal muscles are made
up of long, twisted cells called fibers. Proteins inside the
fibers help your muscles contract and relax. These muscle
movements allow you to run, jump, skip, throw a Frisbee, swim,
and more.

With exercise, muscle fibers grow and multiply. The more you
work out, the stronger and bigger your muscles get.

When you stretch, you lengthen muscle fibers. It then takes
longer for messages from the brain to travel through them.
Stretched muscles also seem to be more sluggish than
unstretched ones. They don't spring back as readily. And every
time you stretch, you may be tearing your muscle fibers a teeny
bit.

Stretching before you exercise is particularly risky, experts
say, because stretched muscles are less stable. That makes it
harder for them to bounce back from the jarring impact of
running, jumping, or weaving around other players on a soccer
field.

Instead of stretching before an activity, experts recommend
warming up by starting slowly to get blood and oxygen flowing
to your muscles. Warming up is also a natural way of stretching
your muscles just enough to prepare them for more intense
activity.

"If you're going to play soccer, jog a bit beforehand," Thacker
says. "If you're going to play baseball, swing the bat before a
game."

Kids don't get injured as often as adults do because they don't
put the same kind of stresses on their joints, Thacker says.
Still, it's never too early to get into good habits.

Girls, especially, have reason to worry. Among high school
athletes, girls are three times more likely than boys to tear
the ACL in their knees. By the time they hit the professional
level, women tear their ACLs up to 10 times as often as men do,
Ingraham says.

Girls hurt their ankles and backs more often than boys, too.
Scientists aren't sure what causes the difference, but girls
tend to be more flexible than boys, Ingraham says. Her research
suggests that this extra flexibility could be part of the
problem. And stretching may only make things worse.

Gentle motions

It may be worth talking about stretching with your coaches and
gym teachers.

But if they insist you keep stretching, don't be too worried,
says fitness expert Jay Blahnik. He has written a book
calledFull-Body Flexibility.

In some cases, gentle stretching can be helpful, Blahnik says,
as long as you do the right kind of stretches at the right time
and you do them correctly.

Instead of grabbing your ankles and yanking or forcing your
body into pretzels, he suggests gentle motions that actively
use your muscles.

Try clasping your hands behind your head, Blahnik recommends.
Then slowly pull your elbows backward and squeeze your shoulder
blades together. "The act of stretching doesn't decrease
injuries," he says, "but we think being mobile and flexible
does."

As part of a cooldown after a workout, light stretching is also
OK, Blahnik says. And, for sports such as gymnastics and
dancing, stronger stretching may be appropriate.

Overall, preparation for sports or exercise should involve a
variety of activities, not just stretching. Athletes, coaches,
trainers, and others need to use the combination of strength
training, conditioning, and warming up that's best for a given
sport.

Whatever you decide to do about stretching, don't stop
exercising. Research continues to show that exercise is good
for your heart, good for your bones, and good for your muscles.
It helps you sleep better and keeps your weight under control.
Running around is fun. It can even make you smarter.

Now, stop reading and get a move on!


II. Acute effects of static stretching on hip flexor and quadriceps flexibility, range of motion and foot speed in kicking a football.

Young W, Clothier P, Otago L, Bruce L, Liddell D.

School of Human Movement and Sport Sciences, University of Ballart, Victoria, Australia.

The purpose of this research was to determine the effect of static stretching in a warm-up on hip flexor and quadriceps flexibility as measured by a modified Thomas test and on range of motion (ROM) of the leg and foot speed at impact in kicking a football with maximum effort. Sixteen Australian Rules (AR) footballers performed two different warm-ups on different days. One warm-up involved five minutes of sub-maximum running followed by seven practice kicks, while the other also included 4.5 minutes static stretching of the hip flexors and quadriceps after the running. A modified Thomas test was conduced before and after each warm-up. Players performed maximum effort drop punt kicks into a net while being videotaped to determine the ROM of the kicking leg and foot speed at impact with the ball. There were no significant changes in flexibility (p > 0.05) as a result of either warm-up and there were no significant differences between the warm-ups in the kicking variables (p > 0.05). It was concluded that the Thomas test may not have been sensitive to possible acute changes in flexibility from the warm-ups, and that stretching had no influence on kicking ROM or foot speed, possibly because of the complexity of the kicking skill.


III. So what's the bottom line?
There's little scientific support for the idea that regular pre-workout stretching reduces the risk of injury during training; this is probably due to the fact that stretching's role in injury prevention is dwarfed by the effects of training quality and quantity - and the fitness, strength, coordination, and natural flexibility of the athletes undertaking the training. It's doubtful that stretching prepares athletes more effectively for exercise than a dynamic warm-up, and in fact there is some evidence (from Lally's work with marathon runners) to suggest that stretching is an ideal post-exercise activity, rather than the perfect exercise antecedent. Reinforcing the notion that stretching is an important, post-workout recovery activity, research has shown that stretching can stimulate the transport of amino acids into muscle cells, accelerate protein synthesis inside the cells, and inhibit protein degradation rates ('Stretch and Skeletal Myotube Growth: What Is the Physical to Biochemical Linkage?', in Frontiers of Exercise Biology, K. Borer, D. Edington, and T. White, eds., Human Kinetics Publishers, pp. 71-84, 1983). These latter effects mean that stretching should foster muscle repair, and they might represent the mechanism underlying Lally's finding that athletes who stretch after workouts are hurt less often. We may yet see a randomized, controlled scientific study linking stretching with reduced rates of injury, but it's likely that this study will involve post-, not pre-workout stretching.

Owen Anderson

Bugel REFUSED to let the "Hogs" stretch - he thought it was a "nonsensical waste of time". I have never stretched my teams (except for one month in the early 1970's as described below).

Unitas said that "warming up is a PERSONAL thing"!!! He said that some QB's could pick a ball up & just start "winging it", while others had warm up slowly. The MOST IMPORTANT thng (to me) is that my players were made to jog to the practice field (around 1/4 mile) at a brisk pace, & I told them if they needed further warm up - to do 10 jumping jacks on their own )or ANYTHING ELSE THEY NEEDED) - but to be ready by the time I got there (I move at a snail's pace).

ONE YEAR - in the early 1970's (only) - we installed the "EXTENSIVE FLEXIBILITY" program originated by Paul Uram (of the Steelers). You had to jog to warm up BEFORE stretching, then stretch. The whole damned routine took 15-20 minutes, & WE HAD MORE PULLED MUSCLES THAN AT ANYTIME IN MY COACHING EXPERIENCE. I wasted all that time & got NO results.

I subscribe to what all these reports are telling us - let the kids warm up in their own way. It worked for me .

Bill,

Like we are always telling the young guys, go with what you know.

JC

Fascinating stuff!

I am having a really hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that you don't need to stretch and that flexibility is overrated.

However, Coach Mountjoy's articles make a compelling argument.

For the coaches who don't do any prepractice stretching, what kind of "dynamic" activities do you do to get your kids warmed up? How long does it take? How many reps of each movement do you do?

A few years ago, our staff went down to the clinic at U of Illinois. I thought that it was very odd that the coaches started practice by sending the players to an individual position segment without stretching first. After reading Coach Mountjoy's article, I see why it might have been done that way.

Jogging is the BEST form of "WARM UP"! (Stretching technically is not a "warm up").

Why most coaches I know have eliminated stretchning is that they get similar effects in drills early in practice, such as this one Bugel used with "HOGS":

FOUR CORNERS = Better drill that stretching. For a guy who is stiff — improves feet. Go ¾ speed. Put 4 cones at the corners of a square — 10 yds. apart. Teaches how to run (over exaggerate arm pump) . Go forward-lateral-backward-lateral. RUN to first cone & come under control — SHUFFLE to next cone (with a slight stagger of L foot if going L & R foot if going R) in a bridge position (sit down & bend, with a wide base — bridge neck — keep hands up - be sure to SHUFFLE — not gallop). BACKPEDAL — then SHUFFLE again. NOTE: Your feet can move TOO fast in pass pro).

ADDED THOUGHT : STRETCHING IS ABSOLUTELY NOT A "WARM UP" TECHNIQUE AS YOU STATE. YOU STRETCH ONLY AFTER INCREASING THE BLOOD FLOW TO THE MUSCLE TISSUE AND GETTING IT "WARM".
I HAVE ALWAYS USED THE ANALOGY OF THE RUBBER BAND IN THE FREEZER AND THE RUBBER BAND IN THE MICROWAVE. YOU TAKE THE BAND OUT OF THE ICE BOX AND YOU CAN ONLY STRETCH IT A SHORT WAYS AND IT WILL SNAP. BUT, YOU TAKE THE PREHEATED BAND FROM THE MICROWAVE AND YOU CAN STRETCH IT A LONG WAY PRIOR TO IT BREAKING. I AGREE 100% THAT JOGGING IS THE BEST WAY TO HEAT THE MUSCLE TISSUE, BUT THE ELONGATING OF THE TISSUE IN STRETCHING IS BENEFICIAL, IMO, NOT DETRIMENTAL AS BROUGHT OUT IN ONE OF THE ARTICLES THAT WAS POSTED. I DON'T THINK WE WILL AGREE ON THIS ONE. YOU KNOW I RESPECT YOUR OPINION.

JC

J.C. - to answer your question as to the kid that "has always done it that way & WANTS to stretch" - we tell them to get out & do their own thing before practice. We literally tell them they can "twist themselves into the shape of a pretzel" if they want - just be ready to go when the whistle blows. Still believe "warm-ups" should be a personal thing. How WE handle it is - Basically - after they jog 1/4 of a mile to the field at a brisk pace (with one captain leading & another bringing up the rear) - do 10 jumping jacks on thier own & by then be ready to go when the coaches get there.

MOST of our FIRST drills (for each position) are ones that are "warm-up" & flexibility type drills (such as the one by Joe Bugel I listed above) - but it is teaching football skills!!!.

Don't feel we need anymore than that!

The one year (I told you about) where we TRIED Extensive Flexibilities (with a reknowned Track coach on our staff teaching & leading the flexibilites) - we suffered just as many pulls as his track team was FAMOUS for. At any given time 50% of his squad had a pull, or THOUGHT they did. Talke careful notice of teams that do a lot of stretching (I have even witnessed this at a few BIG TIME ACC & SEC Colleges) - the kids are watching planes fly over head, joking, looking at cheerleaders (if any are around). Not a lot of effort & concentration!!!!!

J.C. - that's a good point. My MAIN gripe about stretching is that if it's value is in doubt, & you can accomplish the same thing thru jogging, & drill's like Bugel's (that I described above) - why waste 20 minutes to stretch?

Everyone I know who is a believer in stretching says that you MUST do some jogging first to get the blood circulating properly, THEN go thru a very structured stretching program. That takes 15 to 20 (more often 20 than 15) minutes!!! I can't cut that much time out of my practice, when I believe (as did Paul Brown, Bud Wilkinson, & Bum Phillips) in a SHORT time on the field. My practices NEVER go over 2 1/2 hours (including EVERYTHING), & more often than not - it is 1:30 to 2:15 (depending on day of week). 20 minutes is a BIG bite out of that for something that's of "questionable" value, especially when you have 127 kids in uniform (size of my last team at Deep Creek HS - grades 10-12) that need coaching. My son played in a High School program in Richmond that had over 160 kids in the program - they had to maximumize their time also.

As Bear Bryant once said - the ONLY thing you & your opponent have in common is TIME!!!!!