Not only is stretching important for flexibility, it is CRITICAL for massive, rapid muscle growth.
When you think about gaining muscle, stretching is probably not the first thing that pops into your head. But did you know that stretching plays a critical role in building muscle?
Every muscle in your body is enclosed in a bag of tough connective tissue known as fascia. Fascia is important for holding your muscles in their proper place in your body.
But your fascia may also be holding back your muscle growth. Think for a moment about your muscles. You train them and feed them properly. They want to grow and will grow but something is holding them back. They have no room to grow!
The soreness you feel after a workout essentially comes about because you damaged your muscle fibers. Exercise physiologists refer to this as delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and it typically becomes most noticeable a day or two after a workout. What happens is that micro-tears in your muscle fibres generate calcium leakage and an accumulation of histamines, potassium, prostaglandins and local edema (accumulation of fluid) in the affected muscle. The edema stimulates the nerve endings, causing the sensation of pain.The damage to your muscles and subsequent soreness occur to a greater degree as a result of the negative (eccentric) component of an exercise. That may be why you don't always experience the same level of soreness; not all exercises place the same type of eccentric stress on your muscles.
As a kid, I was so awed and inspired by this picture that I had to cut it out of the magazine, hang it on my basement wall, and immediately start doing Preacher Curls (confident of course that I would one day become Mr. Olympia too!). Back in those days, bodybuilding equipment made for a home gym hardly existed and I had to improvise by doing my curls over the back of an incline bench with a single dumbbell at a time. While that version of the exercise was crude and very uncomfortable, I immediately realized that this was the strictest and most productive version of a curl that I could ever do. To this day, I train my biceps exclusively on a Preacher Curl Bench in my own gym. Because my front delts became so strong from bench pressing, I have trouble isolating my biceps with almost any other type of curl. Doing standing dumbbell or barbell curls, or even incline dumbbell curls, my front delts want to take over and swing the weight forward, robbing my biceps of any productive exercise. Only this type of bench eliminates this problem for me and allows me to lift meaningful weights at the same time. As a result I feel the exercise directly in my biceps and not in my front delts.
Squat Analysis
Have you ever seen an optical illusion? A sketch of a young woman is actually the face of an old lady; or the outline of a bird, an old man. Look at them long enough, and all of a sudden you see the image in a new light, bringing new depth and meaning to the artwork. Well, it’s time to take a good, long look around the gym for some of the best chest exercises that you’ve looked at but never really seen. Look hard because they’re there. In fact, they’re closer than you think.