Stretching Tips for Martial Arts

Stretching and developing flexibility is a very important part of any martial arts training, no matter which particular martial art you practice or what level you are at. In many other sports stretching is primarily just a warm up exercise which you do to lessen the chances of sustaining an injury during training or competition. But for a practitioner of the martial arts it is also necessary to develop flexibility to improve performance when using the techniques that you learn, whether it is in a self-defense situation where you have to fight off an attacker or in a competition or tournament, and it may even be that a certain level of flexibility is required to even be able to try certain techniques, such as head kicks.

Of course in one single article I could not possible cover everything that should go into a flexibility training program for martial arts, so I am not even going to try to offer a full program, or even talk about the specific stretching exercises that you might want to use - in any case this would be slightly different for each of the various arts and schools and you should be familiar with a set of exercises from the training you have done at your own club. What I would like to do instead is just to run through some basic principles that should apply across the board at that will hopefully help you to get the most from your stretching.

Firstly, if you want to make real gains in your flexibility then my top tip, which made a huge impact on my own development when I implemented it, is to divide your stretching into small sets rather than doing it all at once. During a general workout or training session many people would do all of their stretching at the beginning of the sessions and than no more after that. Whilst it is important to get some done before you move on to more strenuous activity (to prevent injury as mentioned above), this is not ideal for the purpose of making gains. If you think of your flexibility training like any other type then you will realise that ideally you would want to be warmed up before you do it, rather than just using it as a warm up itself. Doing a good amount of stretching at the end of your session too will really help your progress. A similar principle applies if you are only training flexibility on a particular day. Going for a short jog as a warm up can help you to push your exercises further, and I have found that doing a short set of stretching first thing in the morning improves performance if you then do your main set later on in the day.

An important point to make is that you should add as much variety as you an into the program that you put together. No single exercise can replicate all of the subtle variations, each with a different set of stresses on the body, that you will experience whilst performing martial arts techniques or in an actual fight. So whilst, for example, touching your toes may be a great exercise for stretching the hamstrings, you should not rely on it alone for working this muscle. If you are lacking the knowledge to go through a variety of exercises try searching You Tube, as there are loads of great videos there. But in actual fact most of the time you don't need different exercises, just a bit of variety in the ones you already do. In my example of the hamstrings touching the toes can be performed with the feet together or with the feet apart (reaching to the floor and / or to each foot in turn), with the lower back straight or bent, and with the arms reaching down in front of or behind the legs. Most exercises can be varied in a similar way.

If you still can't make the progress that you would like to make, and if you have a little bit of money which you can spend, you should consider getting yourself a stretching machine which can be a great help, particularly for stubborn areas of the body