No pain, serious gain . When you bounce instead of rubber band, you often will go too far. If the muscle is not ready to go that far (due to rigamortis setting in from your blatant lack of use), then you will either here a “pop” and start crying like a little schoolgirl or just start crying. Either way, if it hurts -- STOP! Learn to listen to your body and understand it takes time to get a flexible body.
Flexibility training should be done at both the warm up and cool down phase of a workout and the benefits of doing so are very rewarding. The improvement in your exercises such as the full hanging leg raise and sports alone are enough to justify its inclusion in your exercise routine but when you combine these benefits with the other pluses such as a reduced risk of injury, a reduction in the pain caused by lactic acid build up, better posture and a return of the grace of movement you had as a youth then flexibility training is an absolute must.
Flexibility: Stretching your tight body in new ways will help it to become more flexible, bringing greater range of motion to muscles and joints. Over time, you can expect to gain flexibility in your hamstrings, back, shoulders, and hips.
Over flexibility can cause injury just as much as insufficient can. It is the case when the muscles have not been strengthened as much as they have been flexed. This causes loss of stability in the joints and the potential tearing of the ligaments and tendons.
Your flexibility is inversely related to how injury-prone you are. The more flexible you are, the less likely you are to accidentally injure yourself during training. This is true of major injuries, but it is also true of minor injuries that leave you stiff and sore for 3-4 days (when you should be bouncing back after 1 day of rest, ideally).
A good flexibility can be really helpful on the tennis court. Lower body and upper body flexibility is required for tennis players who are playing at a high level. A lot of shots are executed in extreme range of motions and this could lead to some injuries. If the muscles are strong and flexible enough players will be able to hit efficient shots in extreme lunge positions for example.
More muscles means less flexibility. Bodybuilders have the most limited range of movement for all the joints, first because they don't stretch, second because the bulging muscles get in the way (remember Zangief in Street Fighter II?). Only athletes and performers who follow power workouts as well as stretching routines (Wushu athletes, gymnasts) can have both muscle strength and flexibility, and their muscles are fine and sinewy, not bulging (think Bruce Lee). In daily life, something like cycling will also decrease leg flexibility if not balanced by just as much stretching. So it's very common for people not to even have the range shown below – look for the parts of their body they use most, and you'll know where they are most stiff.
Including static passive flexibility at the end of your regular workouts is sufficient for anyone who requires only a reasonable amount of flexibility. However, anyone who wants to posses a high level of static passive suppleness will need to do it for 10-20 minutes every day and many people stretch several times per day.
Working on your upper-body flexibility isn't particularly complicated. In fact, often it entails some of the same exercises many runners already do. The difference is that when you work on your flexibility – as opposed to your strength – you want to work on moving more muscles through a wider range of motion than you might, say, on a Nautilus machine.
Sorry to spoil the fun, but flexibility is a “use it or lose it” type of thing. When you don’t stretch, you keep your muscles in a chronically shortened state. Your muscles and fascias adapt to the way you use them, and over time, these soft tissues will start affecting the alignment of your joints. When those joints start wearing out because of inefficient movement patterns, you can develop osteoarthritis, bone spurs and other painful inflammatory responses and injuries. All because you didn’t stretch enough.
Stretching may increase your flexibility, but you will most likely be weaker and the results are often short-lived. Saying that stretching reduces injuries or improves endurance performance, (the two main reasons given for stretching), is like saying certain shoes will make you run or jump faster. Many continue to make both these claims, yet neither has ever been proven, and many still buy the shoes and stretch with them on. Stretching is not exercise and not a warm-up before a run or any activity. Aerobic activity is the best warm-up as it increases flexibility in a safe way while improving oxygen utilization, lung capacity, and fat burning.
The Principle of Strength and Flexibility: Because muscles contract eccentrically while stretching and because the fascia is impregnated along muscles and not just around it, it is essential that the muscles be strong enough to contract while being stretched in order to engage the fascia during the movement. If the muscle isn't strong enough to contract maximally, both in generating tension and in shortening, the fascia cannot be renovated or reconstructed sufficiently to produce upgrades in flexibility.
In order to get a true gain in flexibility, you must continuously contract the target muscle group while elongating it. Many forms of traditional stretching involve contracting the muscle for a specific period of time at a certain point in the stretch. Other forms of stretching don't involve muscle contraction at all, which results in over-stretching and possibly injuring the target muscle group. With Resistance Stretching, you begin all stretches in a position where the muscle(s) are as short as possible and move into a position where the muscle(s) are as long as possible (while resisting continuously) . Most of the stretch occurs during the movement and not at the end point of the stretch.
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