Stretching doesn’t result in any structural changes in muscles or tendons, but only in improved pain tolerance (psychological).
If one wanted to become capable of throwing higher kicks, would the improved pain tolerance to and from static groin and hamstring stretching carry over to the ability to kick higher, or would the approach of just continuously trying to kick higher and higher be superior?
Regards
Can you post a video of you throwing a high kick?
I could add that stretching shouldn’t really hurt so where is the pain tolerance developed?
I don’t have any such videos. I don’t kick that much, I just punch. Just interested as to whether stretching further would generally carry over to kicking higher, or if trying to kick incrementally higher is the only thing that works.
Yea, unfortunately this is difficult to answer without you performing a high kick on video. Sorry, mate.
I can throw a decent roundhouse, but (when I used to do it) my torso tends to tilt backwards excessively when throwing head kicks, if that makes sense.
Point of my question is though, as far as I’ve understood it, stretching is practicing ROM and not altering the structural makeup of tissue, so, is “flexibility” general in the same sense as e.g. aerobic capacity, or not, or do we even know?
I’ve read Mobility Explained, and “There was high‐quality evidence that stretch did not have clinically important effects on joint mobility in people with or without neurological conditions”, while it also said that stretching “increases the extensibility and tolerance to a greater tensile force” … it said that if we are unadapted to the ROM required for a certain movement we have to train the particular movement we wish to improve, yet it also said that, remarkably, individuals with higher task-relevant variability at baseline learned faster than those with lower baseline variability.
… So yeah, just wondering if stretching on the mat, does/can help with throwing kicks or slapping a triangle choke on someone with wide shoulder, on the mat. Or is all stretching utter bogus?
Generally, yes. If you find someone who can do the splits sideways, I would be very surprised if they could not kick well over their head with little to no practice.
And it’s not so much “pain tolerance” as less inhibition. People who are more flexible are not just better at dealing with the pain.
This really can’t be answered without a video. Please record one on your smart phone after saying your name so we can make sure it’s you. Otherwise, we’re just jacking our jaws.