For many, Stretching is not only a way to brag about doing the splits, but also a way to keep yourself in shape and even to lose weight. Stretching exercises do indeed nourish the muscles with oxygen, as a result of which the blood circulation is activated, more useful substances enter the body tissues and metabolism is improved. As a result, you can even lose some pound weight.
Since not every stretching workout is energy-intensive enough to lose enough calories, let’s work out how and in what cases it is effective for weight loss.
Stretching is a set of exercises aimed at stretching the muscles and ligaments and as a result of improving the flexibility of the whole body.
How many calories are spent on a stretching training session?
An hour of stretching routines for dancers consumes an average of 150-200 calories, which of course is much less than an hour of dancing or strength training.
So from a calorie perspective, there are many types of activities that you could be doing to burn more calories during an hour of training. For example, some of the top ones (based on an 11 stone individual as reported by the Sun) by calories per hour are:
- Boxing (800)
- Squash (748)
- Rowing (740)
- Running (700)
- Swimming (680)
- Team sports (614)
- Cycling (604)
Stretching has a number of positive side effects that indirectly affect muscle calorie consumption and body quality in general. Among them:
- increasing the amplitude of movement of the stretched muscle, which means it starts to use more energy when functioning;
- keeping our muscles more limber and looser which ultimately means you might perform better when you do your formal training;
- muscles become more prominent;
- decreasing stress hormones;
- muscle tone is improved.
These are the main reasons why stretching is recommended for all athletes who train in weightlifting.
So what about weight loss? – it’s fair to ask.
Stretching training alone is not good enough for a significant weight loss. But you can combine different types of activities to get a good weight loss or choose alternative workouts that include stretching exercises.
A combination of gym and stretching exercises
– works doubly well for weight loss. If you are engaged in strength training and your goal is to lose weight, try to add some days of stretching to your training schedule, or at least stretch your muscles out after weightlifting.
Dynamic stretching
This is when you do a repeated controlled motion to stretch that muscle group. Some pros of dynamic stretching are that it warms up your body temperature, increases your heart rate and your blood flow, so it’s really good for warming up your muscles.
This type of activity also helps with the speed of your nerve impulses. It helps increase your range of motion before activity. It’s really important to remember not to be too vigorous with your dynamic stretches especially if you are a beginner or if you’re covering from injury. For dynamic stretching, the control is key.
So all of these factors mean that dynamic stretching is something like cardio training and in that way, it helps you to lose your weight and look good.
Here are some useful and effective dynamic workouts we’ve found on YouTube for you:
Energetic warming up exercises
Before any physical activity, including stretching, a warm-up is required. Your body must be prepared in order not to “tear” and not to injure the muscles. Often group training sessions on the stretching are built in such a way that warming-up is the most tempo-intensive and energy-intensive part.
That is, due to the intensity of the warm-up increases and, in general, calorie consumption throughout the workout, which means it is easier to create a calorie deficit and as a result lose weight.
To lose weight, you need to follow simple rules of proper nutrition. Because the main thing that helps us lose weight is a calorie shortage.
Efficiency for Beginners
If you are new to the sport and have never trained before, stretching is likely to be an effective way to lose weight for you, and in the first few months, you will be able to lose from 4 to 9 pounds. This is due to an increase in calorie intake because it’s could be enough to do such kind of activity to lose weight for a body unused to sports.
Examples of Stretching Exercises
You can use any of the exercises available on youtube and on Instagram. We have picked out some of our favorite ones:
- Routine for the Inflexible and beginners:
- Middle splits stretching:
- Side Splits:
- Back flexibility stretches:
Stretching is a quite injury activity. If you train on your own, please be careful: be sure to warm up the body, do exercises without sharp jerks and without using physical strength, breathe deeply, and do not try to achieve quick results. Flexibility requires patience and regularity in training.
Alternative workouts
You can find many other ways to lose weight that are focused on stretching the muscles but not only on that. There are different kinds of yoga, body ballet, pole dance, bar class. All of these exercises will help you with stretching muscles and losing weight. And these ways are not only very effective but also very interesting and include learning many other skills.
Conclusions
To sum up, stretching is not a primary weight-loss activity. It’s something that helps your overall health and will help all the other things that you’re doing with your diet and your exercise. So that’s not to say that certain kinds of exercises that are very stretching focused aren’t phenom for weight loss. That’s examples like yoga or pilates or bar class – those things can really help weight loss but that’s not static stretching, these are dynamic motions that you happen to be stretching but your quads are also burning, you’re activating your core and you’re burning more calories than during static stretching class.
But! It needs to say, that stretching helps you to lose weight indirectly because It gets your body stronger.
Also, stretching can help to lose weight effectively if you are a beginner and you’ve never done any sports activities
Other articles relating to stretching:
Milonga Dance: The uptempo relative of the Argentine Tango
