Flexibility training benefits

Flexibility Training

Flexibility training is nothing else than the good old stretching exercises. These are great for your muscles, and can be done regardless your age or fitness.

These exercises are designed to maintain the elasticity or your muscles, and many professional athletes use these exercises regularly to avoid unnecessary injuries. For regular people, these flexibility exercises can be a way to stay fit. Before starting this training, it is necessary always to warm up your whole body. If you repeat these exercises at least 3 to 5 times, and do that every week for 3 days, and you shouldn’t have to worry about your fitness.

There are different types of flexibility trainings: there is dynamic and static stretching, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) and also ballistic stretching. Static stretching is great to achieve more elastic muscles, and it is usually performed by holding your body for several moments in a specific body posture. Dynamic stretching engages your whole body. You should move parts of the body and increase the speed of the movements. There is also ballistic stretching, which is a vigorous aerobic activity. For this stretching it is always advisable to consult your doctor before starting it. Another type of flexibility training is PNF. When using this type of training people are combining the static stretching with some isometric muscle contractions.

What Can You Gain by Flexibility Training

Flexibility training is proven to have positive effect to the condition of all muscles and joints in your body. It will improve your fitness and balance the muscles in your body, improving your posture at the same time.

Some muscles in the body might be overused or misplaced, and that’s where stretching can help. It can straighten and realign these muscles and lead to better posture. Flexibility exercises can also affect the blood circulation around the joints and provide better supply of the nutrients from the blood to the joints. The studies revealed that stretching improves muscle coordination and elasticity, decreasing potential problems with muscle degeneration and bone deformities.

These exercises are proven very helpful for older people having back pains, but also for teenagers. Many teenagers have problems with aches and pains in their muscles and tendons. Young people who performed stretching exercises were much less often affected with this kind of problems.

Most of our muscles are contracted at all times. Stretching may relax those muscles and thus remove all the stress from the body. Also, relaxed muscles can much easily release accumulates toxins.