I Stretch Before Every Run. The Science Says It's Not Doing What I Thought.
A marathon training update, and the real reason I chart my playlists
I’ve stretched before workouts my whole athletic life. Competitive swimming, tennis, now marathon training at an age where the warm-up matters more than it used to. The gospel was simple and I never questioned it: stretch, or you’ll get hurt.
So training for my first marathon, I did the thing I do with every belief I’ve held too comfortably — I went and read what the evidence actually says. Short version: the stretching I do is good for me. It’s just not doing the job I thought it was.
Here’s what surprised me. The big fear — that stretching before you run “kills your power” — is mostly overblown. The largest review out there (264 studies) pegs the hit to power from static stretching at about negative 1.9 percent — which they literally classify as “trivial” — as long as you keep the holds short and inside a real warm-up. The meaningful power drop only shows up when you do long, isolated holds, which no runner needs to do before a run anyway. So the panic about stretching wrecking your run? Largely a myth.
But here’s the one that actually rearranged my thinking: stretching doesn’t really prevent injuries. Multiple systematic reviews land in the same place — routine static stretching does not meaningfully lower injury rates. What does? Strength training. A landmark meta-analysis of 25 trials and ~26,000 people found strength work cut overall injuries to about a third, and overuse injuries — the kind that ends marathon dreams — by almost half, with a clear “more is better” curve. Stretching showed no significant effect. For runners, the other big lever is just as unglamorous: don’t ramp your mileage like an idiot.
I love that, honestly. The thing I’d been treating as armor is really just maintenance — it keeps me mobile, it feels good, it gets me ready to move — and the actual injury insurance is the boring stuff I was tempted to skip.
Even the coaches at the top see it on the ground. Dan Pfaff — the track & field coach who coached Donovan Bailey—The 1996 Atlanta Olympic Gold Medalist in the 100m and guided Greg Rutherford to Olympic long-jump gold in 2012 — put it plainly in a lecture reported by Athletics Weekly: “I have guys – and if they are restricted in a few key areas then we are going to stretch before we do the workout,”adding that “our power output doesn’t go down – any of the stuff the literature says, I don’t see it.”
Derrick Adkins, Olympic Gold medalist in the 400m Hurdles (Atlanta 1996) — who I know personally and now coaches sprinters in NYC — has often told me that stretching is much more important for sprinters than marathoners, much more. “But even for sprinters, strengthening is more important for injury prevention than stretching. For sprinters, stretching is of moderate importance. For marathoners it is of minimal importance. For both, muscle-strengthening is of maximal importance; however, the strengthening programs for marathoners and sprinters should look vastly different.”
The man who’s coached Olympic medalists and the coach who’s won a gold medal agree with the meta-analysis: short, targeted, sensible — not religion.
So here’s how I actually warm up now — and you can watch me do it in the video. Nothing fancy: dynamic stuff before I run — hamstring sweeps, walking lunges, open and close gates, high knees, then an easy jog to find the rhythm. 10 to 12 minutes. The longer, sink-into-it static stretches I save for after, or for their own flexibility session, when I’m not about to ask my legs for power. (This is what works for me — not a prescription. Your hips, your history, your call.)
The mental shift is the whole point: stretch because it keeps you loose and because it feels good — not because you think it’s the thing standing between you and the sidelines. Then go lift something heavy and add your miles slowly. That’s the armor.
On the Run → Experience and POV from a first-time marathoner, not medical or physical-therapy advice. The video is my routine, not a regimen — if something hurts, see a pro, not a Substack.