I never completely abandoned stretching, but all the bad press on stretching meant that for most of the past 10 years it was a very low priority. Reading various studies showing that stretching is correlated with injury, and seeing grisly descriptions of the microscopic stress to muscle fibers made it easier to finish a workout and go straight to showering and drinking. The book on recovery I recently mentioned goes so far as to ridicule athletes mindlessly following stretching rituals they might have learned back in a high school physical education class without any evidence whatsoever of physiological benefit.
Yet each and every one of the half-dozen visits with a physical therapist or for acupuncture or sports massage, the therapist without fail has said to me emphatically something along the lines of: “DUDE - YOU NEED TO STRETCH”
Apparently evidence suggest that both very high and very low levels of flexibility are higher risk factors for injury, and clearly as the years had gone by my limited range of motion had only grown even more narrow. I had become something of an outlier in terms of low flexibility — I could hardly bend and stretch must past my knees.
In February the physical therapist tells me that my heel pain is ultimately rooted in the extreme inflexibility in my lower calf and achilles. Either I work to become more flexible or I face the terrible fate of painful and debilitating plantar fasciitis. Before I had maybe at most stretched once per day. Now I was told to stretch EVERY FEW HOURS.
Moreover now I was carefully measuring my progress. In the past when I did yoga faithfully every week I never saw progress. But now I am laser focused on reaching a tiny bit farther each day. As I found with push-ups and the Murph test, there is nothing like having a goal and measurable feedback to turbocharge exercise activity.
It is an effort just to reach down and touch my knees, but each day I see gradual progress — I take deep breaths and push myself farther and farther. Within a month I am able to do something I have not achieved since childhood — I can keep my knees perfectly locked and reach down and touch my toes.
Eventually the heel pain vanishes and now I am trying to remind myself to stretch every day — many times per day.
