One widespread belief about strength training is that it makes you “muscle bound” and inflexible.
To counter this, the common recommendation is to “stretch what you strengthen” by doing some form of stretching after a workout.
However, while stretching is traditionally seen as the best way to increase your flexibility, it’s not the only way to do it.
In fact, there is a very simple way to improve your flexibility without doing any stretching at all.
It doesn’t involve adding anything to your workout. In fact, this may actually save you time in the gym.
Nor does it require standing on Swiss balls, vibration plates, BOSU balls or any of the other gimmicks that seem so popular right now.
Strange as it may sound, simply lifting weights can improve your flexibility as well as, or even better than, typical static stretching.
Those are the surprising findings of a study just published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
Participants were divided into groups doing static stretching, resistance training or nothing at all (control group). The study measured flexibility at the knee, hip and shoulder.
After five weeks, stretching was found to have no significant advantage over resistance training.
In fact, some participants in the strength training group showed a greater increase in flexibility than the stretching group.
As an example, the figure below shows the results from the knee extension assessment (KEA) test in the resistance training (RT), static stretching (SS) and control groups. The change in flexibility was roughly the same for both the RT and SS groups.
In all measures of flexibility (hip extension, hip flexion, shoulder extension, knee extension), the researchers found no significant difference between the static stretching and resistance training groups.
“The results suggest that carefully constructed, full-range resistance training regimens can improve flexibility as well as — or perhaps better than — typical static stretching regimens,” says James R. Whitehead, Ed.D, FACSM, one of the study authors.
In other words, strength training — as long as it’s done over the full range of movement (ROM) — will increase flexibility.
So if you’re already lifting weights, there may be less need to incorporate additional stretching exercises than has previously been believed (although it has been shown to enhance strength gains in novice lifters).
I should point out that this experiment was only a preliminary study of the topic. The number of participants (12 people in each group) was fairly small, and the short duration of the trial (5 weeks) means that we don’t know how strength training affects flexibility over a longer period of time.
However, it’s certainly not a single, lone piece of information that contradicts a large amount of existing research on the subject, and the results are consistent with other trials (such as this one and this one) showing that strength training will increase rather than decrease your flexibility.
What’s more, the findings aren’t just specific to healthy, active college-aged men and women. Strength training has been shown to improve flexibility in both elderly women and men in their late 60′s and 70′s.
In fact, I first came across the topic when the late Mel Siff wrote about it in Facts and Fallacies of Fitness:
Research has corroborated the PNF approach that overall flexibility is developed most effectively by full range strength training, some of which may even include strong recruitment of the stretch reflex.
Furthermore, there is no real need to prescribe separate stretching exercises or sessions, since logically structured training should take every joint progressively through its full range of static and dynamic movement.
That’s not to say you should quit stretching altogether. The amount of time you spend stretching will depend very much on your individual circumstances and ROM requirements.
However, many beliefs about the benefits of stretching lack strong research evidence to support them — stretching has been shown to have little effect on muscle soreness, doesn’t appear to do much for injury prevention and is a long way from being the only way (or even the best way) to improve your flexibility.
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