Why I Don’t Stretch—and Never Get Injured | Stretching vs. Mobility for Healthspan

Here’s something controversial: I’m a strength and conditioning specialist in my 50s, a competitive athlete, and I don’t have a stretching routine. Yet I don’t pull muscles, strain hamstrings, or tweak my back. Why?

In this episode of HealthSpan Digest, I unpack the stretching debate:

• The real science behind flexibility and injury prevention
• Why most people stretch with the wrong expectations
• How to build mobility through strength (and why that matters more)
• When stretching actually helps—and when it doesn’t
• One thing you can do today to protect your joints and extend your healthspan

Whether you’re a busy professional, middle-aged parent, or weekend warrior, this episode gives you the clarity and tools to train smarter—not just stretch longer.

🎯 The ONE Thing: Train your mobility with strength—not just passive stretching.

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Transcript

Here's something controversial. I'm a strength and conditioning specialist, a competitive athlete, and I do not have a stretching routine. I don't carve out time for long mobility sessions. I don't bend down and touch my toes and stretch like I used to before high school basketball. Yet I perform at a high level and I don't pull muscles. I don't have hamstring strains. I don't tweak my calves. And why is that? Today we're gonna unpack what the science really says about stretching.

why so many people are doing it, maybe with the wrong expectations from it, and how you can actually build a body that doesn't need to stretch to stay pain free. My name is Aaron Shaw and I am from HealthSpan Physio Coaching. I've got three decades as a coach, I'm an occupational therapist, a competitive athlete, a lover of science, nutrition, fitness,

And I focus on working with middle-aged clients who are busy professionals, have family, have a ton of responsibilities and are really feeling the downward slope of health. Generally feeling tired, burnt out, sluggish, probably feeling a little bit overweight and really losing touch with themselves. And my clients are people who want to make the best use of the limited time possible. So we leverage my smartphone app, my accountability, my support contact with me. ⁓

We can help them achieve their unique potential. And dare I say, achieve their potential despite getting older, despite having aches and pain, despite having the wear and tear of life as we all do as we navigate middle age like myself.

but let me start with a personal story. So I am in my fifties. I train, I exercise most days of the week. So probably six days of the week, I am exercising and I do this with intention. am a competitive cyclist. These days I compete in mountain bike races. I compete in gravel races. I lift weights a couple of days a week. I ski and snowboard when the snow is on the ground, which I can't wait till that happens again. And.

I don't get sidelined by preventable injuries. And how is that possible? Especially when I've never relied on stretching routines. I have done yoga before. I can probably count on one hand how many times in my 50 plus years that I've done yoga. I've done it a couple of times, but suffice to say that it's pretty easy for me to say I do not do yoga. I'm not against yoga. I think it's totally cool. And I think there's absolutely a place for it, which I'll get into here in a minute, but I move well because

I have built strength through my full ranges of motion, not because I stretch. So I don't chase flexibility for the sake of having it. I really focus on building capacity and resilience. But what does the science actually say about stretching?

Let's start with this concept of stretching and injury. We have to be clear that stretching does not equal injury proofing yourself. Stretching does increase flexibility. can work, you know, maintain your joint range of motion. And it may even give you a sense of reduced muscle stiffness. The science will say that it is when done well, and there's some finesse to this here, but when done well,

It might aid in post exercise recovery, soreness, really specifically the soreness, but we have to remember something about stretching. In comparing it to exercise, comparing it, let's say to resistance training or even cardio for that matter. So whether you're running, cycling, lifting weights, you're in a, in an exercise class and you've got dumbbells and you're jumping around doing stuff. We know that that causes tissue damage. That's the whole point of doing it. We are literally intentionally.

causing microscopic damage to our muscles. So when we recover, when we rest, when we get a good night's sleep, the muscles will rebuild stronger than before your exercises. resistance training, cardiovascular training, the pounding of running, cycling, whatever it may be, it does damage your tissue. That's part of the process. Also what damages your tissue is stretching.

stretching also damages tissue. So I just want to maybe frame this in our minds that if you go through an exercise session knowing that, I just did some wear and tear in my muscles, kind of have microscopic damage to the tissue. Now what I'm going to do is add more microscopic damage to the tissue by stretching. I want to just be really thoughtful about that and take pause maybe before doing that.

Stretching has been shown to decrease some chronic neck and back pain. can kind of really facilitate relaxation, which is good. I also want to talk a little bit about the mental and emotional benefits of stretching. So stretching has been shown to shift our nervous system towards what we call a parasympathetic phase. So this is, you we have our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. These are like,

too mini systems of our nervous system, if you will. Our sympathetic nervous system kind of gets us amped up. It's anxiety, it's stress, it may be good stress. Parasympathetic nervous system is one that kind of calms things down. And stretching has been shown to help stimulate our body to shift more into this So if you are stressed out, busy day at work,

feeling overwhelmed. can almost associate that with like muscle tension and muscle tightness because you're anxious, let's say stretching is awesome stretching when done well. And I'm going to describe shortly here, like how to do it safely, how to do it well, but stretching can help shift our nervous system into a calmer state. And that is where I would say the idea of doing yoga, not aggressive yoga, not

I don't even know that I know there's different buzzwords these days where there's power yoga, whatever you want to call it. So maybe not super intense, but a little gentle stretching in any yoga class can help you shift into a state of more relaxation. So that is great. But what I want to make sure that we don't do is I don't want us to confuse stretching with exercise.

Stretching is, you can look at it as a modality or as a tool in the toolbox. But if your goal for the day is like, I got to get in some exercise because I really need to build my heart health and my lean muscle mass. And I want to, you know, burn some calories. I want to lose some fat. Stretching is not the way to do it. Stretching is not exercise. It has a clear value. Some of the things I just mentioned.

but it's not necessarily in the ways that people assume it is. I've worked with thousands of clients through my three decade career, both as a therapist and as a strength and conditioning specialist. And sometimes people will slot in stretching and stretching type activities as opposed to doing resistance training, as opposed to doing cardiovascular training and think that it's an equal exchange. It's an apple for an apple. Everything's fair.

It's like, well, no, I haven't been doing my resistance training, but I've just been doing stretching instead before I go to bed. that's just, that's pretty good. Right. It's like, well, no, it's not, it's, it's not the same. Any, any, any more like than would say, you know, I'm not doing any strength training, but you know, I had three glasses of water today, which is good for me. Right. Yeah. Glasses of water, having glasses of water that is good for you, but it's not strength training. So

Stretching can be healthy. There are certainly benefits for it. Benefits with doing it, but do not confuse that with actual exercise. Let's talk about injury prevention. Does stretching prevent injury? And I think back to when I was in high school, we would stretch before every basketball practice, before every football practice, before every sport we would stretch. And in my mind,

I always thought of it as a performance enhancer and to make sure that we don't get hurt. Well, ended up getting an ACL tear. So I can't really say that stretching, you know, will decrease or will eliminate your risk of getting injured. But ultimately the research specifically on stretching and injury is mixed. So there's some studies that suggest that it may help some, there's some studies that suggest that it doesn't do anything at all.

So I would just make sure that if you were gonna stretch in relation to thinking, I wanna make sure I stretch out so I don't get hurt, there isn't really a clear line between those two things. There's so many other variables that are involved in that, that stretching alone cannot, we can't put a pin in that and say, this is definitely gonna decrease your risk of injury.

There is some interesting research on it on stretching specifically in relation to force output. And this is really where I want to call out people who are getting ready to, let's say, go for a run or go for a ride bicycle ride. And I see this all the time and I'll be, I'll be getting ready to go do a group ride. And there's always going to be a few people off in the side that are doing these really long quadriceps stretches where they kind of pulling their leg behind their butt.

while they're standing up and they're pulling really hard, kind of getting that nice quad stretch. The research has shown that stretching, doing static stretching, so that'd be a static stretch where they're like, you know, putting tension on a muscle and holding it there. And it may feel good to do that, but it can actually reduce the amount of force and power that that muscle is going to be able to demonstrate in the near term. if you think about a muscle and a tendon unit,

Think of it as a spring. So it was kind of like spring loaded. There's tension in there that's ready to take action. It's ready to start pedaling. It's ready to start lifting, pushing or pulling resistance. It's ready to start jumping, whatever it is. And if before you go into that activity, you do this static stretch, you're basically loosening that spring. You're loosening the potential force, the potential power output of that muscle tendon unit.

before you go do the activity where you actually are gonna call upon your body to produce force. So you're taking fuel off the top. So I would advise against doing that. But let's think a little bit about dynamic stretching. This is a more active way of doing it. So this would be doing a warmup where you're going through the motions that you expect to do.

And again, let's say we'll use cycling as the example is a really simple one to start. If you're going to do a challenging bicycle ride, whether that's duration or intensity, challenging course, keeping up with the group, whatever it may be. And you think, Hey, I really want to warm up for this. want to make sure my body's ready, ready for this. You know, everybody ⁓ leaves the parking lot at the same time. Great. The best way to warm up for that would be to do a slow gradual.

easy bicycle ride for maybe 10 minutes before the actual event starts. Maybe even longer, depending on how intense your event's going to be. That would be dynamically warming up the tissue, increasing blood flow to the muscles that you're going to be using for your event. And so it's very specific to the tissue that you want to use and you're not

stretching out and eliminating all of that potential energy, the potential force output that you're actually going to want to use. And to switch that over to resistance training, definitely doing a general cardiovascular warmup brief, not an interval session, but you know, five minutes on a treadmill, perfectly fine. Get the blood pumping. And then if you're going to go do a lift and in this case, let's say we're going to do a shoulder press. So grabbing a dumbbell and lifting it up, lifting it up overhead. great shoulder exercise.

And when you're doing that, instead of taking 10 minutes and stretching out your pecs and stretching out the back of your shoulder and doing all these things again, and eliminating this potential energy that you have in these muscles and tendons, instead take a lightweight and go through the actual range of motion that you're going to expect to do in that lift, but do it at a 25 % of the resistance that you think you're going to be doing.

So what you're doing in this case is you're going to be providing nutrition, blood flow to the specific muscles that you're going to have higher demands for here in your working sets without stretching out the energy, the elasticity of that tissue that we really want to keep for the demands that we're going to put upon the tissue. So dynamic warmups are far better than static stretching before you do an activity.

We're talking.

a proper warmup, managing the resistance, managing the load and controlling our movements. That's, that is absolutely key. So flexibility does not prevent injuries, but resilience does. Strength does. Mobility does. But flexibility in and of itself, being bendy, does not prevent injuries.

Let's move on into types of stretching and maybe when to use them. And I'll start with some definitions. So we have flexibility. Think of flexibility as passive motion. It's sitting on the floor and bending over and touching your toes. Feel that hamstring stretch or your low back stretch. That is flexibility or even better yet, think about just simply standing up and bending down and touching your toes. So that is flexibility.

It's just seeing how much elasticity, how much motion do you have in your joints, in your joint capsule, in your ligaments, in your muscles? How long is this tissue? That is flexibility. But what is different with mobility? Mobility is having that range and having strength. It's making sure that you can control that position.

Flexibility, think of it this way. Flexibility is the ability to get into a position. Mobility is flexibility multiplied by strength. And that is what I am after. I don't care if I can touch my toes, if I can't lift up a dumbbell off the floor with control, or I don't care if I can touch my toes, if I can't pick up a bag of soil because we're doing gardening and planting plants in my backyard.

having that flexibility, being bendy and getting down to a certain position so I can touch my toes and be super flexible does not mean anything if I do not have the strength to do something from that position. And that is mobility.

So let's think of this from the point of view of a parent with a toddler, young one. It doesn't matter if the parent can bend down to reach a toddler who's on the floor. That's, that's flexibility. That's okay. But unless that parent has the strength to move to that position and from that position, picking up the child, that flexibility alone doesn't, doesn't mean anything. So that person needs mobility.

which is flexibility plus strength. So real movement capacity is about being strong and stable throughout that full range of motion. Again, it's not just being bendy.

So the type of stretches we have that we can talk about are these dynamic stretches, which is the best kind of pre-exercise way to warm up. I've talked about from a bicycle standpoint, it'd be going pedaling softly and gradually kind of getting warmed up. Dynamic stretching could be really kind of simulating the activity you're doing. So if you think about runners, for example, if you ever watched the Olympics and see somebody ⁓ preparing

They're not sitting there, bending down, touching their toes and holding it for minutes on end. What they're doing is they're hopping, skipping, jumping around, you know, brisk walking, little, little bursts. they're gradually dynamically warming up the tissue, activating their nervous system, getting some, some very activity specific length into the tissue that they're going to be using when they compete. That is dynamic stretching. You can also think of

dynamic stretching or a dynamic warmup being for those of you that are going to be in the gym doing this, literally, if you have whatever exercise you're about to do, let's say it's a squat, for example, Instead of doing

toe touches, instead of bending your foot behind you to stretch out your quad, do some full depth squats with no weight, no resistance at all. Gradually can kind of have repetition over repetition. can go deeper and deeper and deeper. That's going to give you the mobility that you need to perform the exercise. And you're not going to be zapping your potential energy by doing a static stretch. So

Can you do static stretching? Is there ever a good time just to bend down and touch your toes or to hold your leg behind you, but you know, bend your knee, kind of like stretch out your quad. Sure. Do it on days that you're not actually doing resistance training. Do it on days you're actually not doing exercises. So think of this as your kind of your off day, if you will. And some people would say, well, you should really do some stretching post exercise. And I think that the, the evidence may be a little bit mixed on that because again,

If you've already done exercise, you've already damaged some tissue, you've caused some inflammation, you cause some wear and tear in the tissue. Static stretching after that is layering on more tissue damage. So I would, I would tread very lightly in doing that.

So let's be mindful about there are different types of stretches. And of course, there's like ballistic stretching, which I won't get into. Do not do them. It's a great way to get hurt. So the practical advice with this would be if it feels good and it doesn't interfere with your training, go ahead and do it, but just don't rely on stretching as your fix all.

But let's talk about how long we should be holding a stretch for. So we've decided, you know what? It does feel good to stretch. I'm not going to do it before my workout, but I'm not working out today and I do feel kind of stiff and I'm a little bit stressed out. I know that when I stretch, feels good. How am I supposed to do this safely? Well, the first thing I would suggest you do is five to 10 minutes of light cardio before stretching. This could be just going for a brisk walk around your neighborhood, five or 10 minutes. Maybe get on a stationary bike. If you have a bike.

five or 10 minutes, nice and easy, just kind of moving things around, get the blood pumping, get your cardiovascular system kind of turned on a little bit. And then you can stretch after your muscles are a little bit warm. You're gonna hold a static stretch for around 30 seconds with light to medium tension. This should be that sensation where, yeah, maybe it kind of hurts so good, like it feels, you may.

kind of grunting groan with it a little bit should not be painful. Absolutely should not be painful, but you're going to feel a little bit around 30 seconds is enough to kind of start, start at least stimulating the, that nervous system feedback that you may start to feel good. You may start to feel a little bit relaxed. And it's good to go through these motions, do these stretches two, three, maybe four times per muscle group.

thousands of different ways you can stretch your body, move your body so you feel some tension on it. You can explore all of those. The key thing is to avoid anything that's uncomfortable or anything that even if you have the intuition, like it doesn't feel quite right, then I would definitely just not do it.

you're going to avoid bouncing. So we don't want that quick pull bouncing sensation or tension on our ligaments, ⁓ tendons and muscles. We want it to be smooth and consistent and you know, that just right tension, not like it's bouncing up and down. Then those forces are too ballistic and out of control.

If you want some really prolonged effects from this, you could do this a couple of days a week, but I do have to add that if you have limitations, if you have, for example, shoulder impingements, if you have a postural restrictions, if you have proper rehab, you know, therapy needs, then there is a place for targeted stretching. And that is beyond the scope of what I could possibly talk about in this podcast.

Again, I'm an occupational therapist. I've been doing it for three decades. I've spent countless hours stretching people post broken bones, post surgery, post tendon repairs, post, you know, all sorts of terrible injuries. There is a time and place for static stretching. There is a time and place to stretch very specific tissues for very specific reasons. And if you need that type of help, find a therapist, find somebody that can really kind of.

diagnose what your restriction may be. Make sure that's really custom to you and what your needs are.

So my final thoughts on this is that stretching isn't bad. It's just maybe misunderstood. It's a tool. It's a tool in the toolbox. I would not outsource your movement quality to a static stretch. I would not outsource your, your idea of preventing injury to doing static stretching. think static stretching is frankly way overrated if not, you know, almost useless from a performance standpoint.

On the other hand, I would say static stretching as a way to calm our nervous system, to feel good, feeling emotionally good, to feel a little bit more relaxed is awesome. Spot on. That feels good to you. Absolutely do it. We just need to be clear that static stretching, know, bending down and touching your toes is not going to one, it's not going to decrease your risk of injury. It's not going to increase your physical performance. It is not exercising, but

If it feels good, get your head in the right place, boost your spirit, then absolutely do static stretching. The key is knowing why you are stretching and making sure that, really determining is there another method that might serve you better? Meaning maybe you need some more of a dynamic warmup if you're gonna do performance. And.

In regards to mobility, again, if we can think of mobility as having that flexibility plus strength, we can train through full ranges of motion. We can train through to go back to our squat. We could take a squat, a barbell, put it across our back and pick a weight that we can go through a full or nearly full range of motion with resistance. That is the sweet spot.

So it may be a little bit of an ego check because if you want to put on a whole bunch more weight, and you can only squat down maybe, you know, 30 % of the, of your full squatting, depth, you know, it's okay. You'll get stronger in that 30 % range of motion, not necessarily be stronger to your full range of motion. And if your goal is like, I want to be really flexible. Then yeah, you want to be maybe flexible and strong trained to that full range of motion.

It's a great, it's a great way to make sure that when you bend down to pick up your toddler, when you've been down to pick up a heavy bag or whatever you're bending down to do, that you have both the range of motion and the strength and the durability, the resilience, the physical capacity to do the activity you want to do. And stretching alone is not going to do that for you.

So here's one thing you can do today to extend your healthspan. Health span being the length of time within our lifespan that we are healthy, active, vibrant and mobile and strong and have fitness and are sleeping well and are eating well. But the one thing you can do is to train your mobility with strength, not just passive stretching.

Being able to get into a position is one thing, being strong and stable in that position is a totally different thing. And that is what's to protect your joints, improves your performance, and keeps you moving well for decades to come.

Mobility equals flexibility times strength. You can train mobility during your squats, your lunges, your overhead work, et cetera. So my question to you is, what is your stretching story? Why do you stretch? When do you stretch? What benefits do you find from stretching? Has it helped you? Have you ever been injured from stretching?

So those are my questions to you. If you have any questions about stretching or anything else fitness related, sleep, nutrition, send me a DM, shoot me an email, comment on this video or comment on this podcast. I respond to everybody that reaches out to me.

And if you want some tips that are specific to you, I'm happy to do consults. I'm still taking on coaching clients right now, so you can check out my contact information associated with this video. And until then, it's okay to stretch. It's okay to improve your mobility. Just be mindful of why you're doing what you're doing. Do it safely, make sure you don't get hurt, and extend your healthspan. Cheers.