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Stretching - Why should I?

By Brad Walker
Flexibility Expert
Updated: June 18, 2008
This short article looks at some of the tips, tricks and helpful hints you can use to help prevent sports injury. It's been put together to answer some of the more common questions we get regarding stretching and sports injury, and details a number of useful sports injury prevention techniques. I hope it proves useful to you.

Overcoming & Preventing Sports Injury
If you're involved in the health & fitness industry, whether it be participating in your favorite sport, coaching, training or just keeping fit, you'll know how annoying and debilitating a sports injury can be. In reality, when you have a sports injury you're actually losing on two fronts. Firstly, you're losing simply because your body has been hurt and now needs time and care to repair itself. And on top of this, you're also losing the time you could have been putting into training and improving your sporting ability.

A sports injury is a bit like losing money. Not only do you lose whatever you were going to buy with that money, but you also have to work hard to make up the money you've lost. Take it from me; a sports injury is one of the most frustrating and debilitating occurrences that can happen to anyone who's serious about their health, fitness, sport or exercise.
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The Cold, Hard Facts
I recently read an article titled "Managing Sports Injuries" where the author estimated that over 27,000 American's sprain their ankle every day. (And, no, that's not a typo, EVERY DAY) On top of this, Sports Medicine Australia estimates that 1 in every 17 participants of sport and exercise, are injured playing their favorite sport. This figure is even higher for contact sports like Football and Gridiron. However, the truly disturbing fact is that up to 50 percent of these injuries may have been prevented.

The Professionals Secret Weapon
While there are a number of basic preventative measures that will assist in the prevention of sports injury, there is one technique that has slowly been gaining in popularity. It's still not used as often as it should be by the average sports participant, but with the professionals using it more and more, it's only a matter of time before it starts to catch on. Before we dive into this little used technique for minimizing your likelihood of sports injury, let's take a quick look at some other techniques to help you prevent sports injury.

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