STRETCHING THE POINT
FOR THE PAST DECADE, MOST ATHLETES AND COACHES HAVE USED DYNAMIC STRETCHING AS PREPARATION FOR TRAINING, BUT IS IT REALLY THE ANSWER, ASKS JOHN SHEPHERD?
SINCE THE 1990s, virtually all athletes and coaches have used a variation of the dynamic warm-up, moving away from the plod-stretchsprint ‘old school’ preparation that had been applied for decades. In the UK, we were relatively late to gasp the concept of warm-up dynamics.
I recall a coaching course I went on with former Soviet head coach and all-time great long jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesyan in the early 1980s. It seemed revolutionary at the time in that, on instruction to warm-up, before we could even start jogging Ter-Ovanesyan had us doing jumping jacks and star jumps and the like. This was something new and exciting and, in retrospect, an early exposure to the dynamism of things to come.