Wellness Day Presentation: Stretching

Because we are both athletes involved in multiple sports throughout the year, Maxine and I chose to explore Warm Up and Cool Down Stretches for our wellness day presentation. I'm on the Varsity tennis team for SHS and as the season continued, we became lazy and stopped warming up and stretching before practicing. As a result, many people on the team started getting injured - spraining their ankles and getting tennis elbow. I wanted to explore why this was and how not stretching played a role in the injuries. Maxine had some similar experiences with her softball team, which is why we chose this topic. We began our project by asking classmates to post a couple sentences on the canvas discussion board about why certain stretches/exercises are used to warm up for one sport while different ones are used for another sport? We also asked classmates to write about how the stretches used to warm up for a particular sport help to warm up for that sport. 

Most people posted that stretching prepares the muscles that are used in the activity, so people who play upper body intensive sports tend to stretch out the arms and shoulders more, while those who play lower body intensive sports tend to stretch out the legs. For example, basketball players stretch out their legs and arms before playing, gymnasts do toe touches to improve their flexibility, and runners warm up with a light jog so not to run with cold muscles and get injured. Warming up before a sport is extremely important because it increases a body's internal temperature and stretches out the muscles around joints, making one less prone to injury. This increase in body temperature is crucial as it makes it easier for the lungs to gather oxygen, lowers the rate of metabolic reactions, increases the blood flow to muscles, reduces muscle viscosity, and increases nerve impulses. 

There are four main kinds of stretching: ballistic, static, dynamic, and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation. Ballistic movements involve repetitive bouncing movements, static movements stretch the muscles to the point of slight discomfort and is held for long periods of time. Dynamic movements challenge the muscles but in a comfortable range. Lastly, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation uses alternating contractions of the muscles. The stretches in each of these categories are separated even further into passive stretches, both of which are equally beneficial to the warm up process. 

From this project, I learned the importance of stretching and especially, how that warms up one's body temperature before doing strenuous physical activity. This topic is extremely important for health and wellness because without stretching, athletes would be more likely to get injured if they play a sport when their muscles are cold. On a scale of 1 to 10 for this project, I would definitely give myself a 9.5-10. Maxine and I put a lot of thought and effort into this project and tried our best to make it personal by reflecting on our own experiences. Maxine and I worked really well together as a team; we worked on the presentation together, had a video chat to go over the details of the presentation, and really thought through what information we wanted to go over with the class. I'm really proud of the presentation we made and will start thinking twice before I play tennis or go running without stretching and warming up.

For more details about this topic, see the powerpoint presentation we used here.