People who like sports and fitness know that whether we are running outdoors or doing indoor equipment fitness, or any other exercise, what do we need to do before? Warm up? Exercise, which usually focuses on moving muscles and joints, raises body temperature and makes muscles and joints more relaxed and flexible, thus avoiding various injuries during exercise. It is also a kind of physical adjustment before exercise. And then what? Warm up? Activities include stretching, which can be divided into static stretching and dynamic stretching. So stretching before exercise is necessary. Now let's talk about the function and significance of stretching before exercise.

For the role of muscles, before we do exercise, usually all parts of the body are in a state of inflexibility or even rigidity, including muscles, joints, ligaments and other parts. Especially in the muscle part, some safe and effective stretching exercises should be done properly before exercise, which can lengthen and relax the whole body muscles, especially the legs, improve muscle flexibility and coordination, and reduce muscle damage caused by sudden exercise. Some professional athletes need the coach's special guidance and help to warm up, so this warm-up activity is very important for them, such as football players. We ordinary people don't need too complicated and too long stretching before exercise. We just need to do some routine movements, move our muscles and sweat a little, usually about ten minutes.

For tissues such as joints and ligaments, stretching activities are also beneficial to our joints and ligaments. When we do stretching and warm-up exercises, we can accelerate the blood circulation of the whole body and drive the body temperature to rise, so we will increase and improve the flexibility of the body, which is of great help to the flexibility of joints, ligaments and some connective tissues, and can also increase the range of motion of joints. However, if warm-up and stretching activities are omitted before exercise, strenuous exercise can easily cause damage to joints and ligaments under the condition of low body flexibility and low body temperature. Once the joint is injured, it is not easy to recover, but it is not worth the loss to cause physical injury for exercise and fitness.

When stretching, we should pay attention to some things, such as combining dynamic stretching with static stretching as much as possible, because besides stretching muscles, we should also improve the flexibility of joints, not only going to leg press or stretching, but also doing some actions like jumping or kicking, and properly moving wrists and ankles. In addition, the stretching time should not be too long and the amplitude should not be too large. After all, it's just a warm-up before exercise, as long as you feel a little temperature rise and sweat slightly. Common stretching actions include lunge sideways stretching, sitting posture with legs pressed down, abdominal stretching and upper body stretching from left to right. There are many stretching actions, but we should pay attention to the combination of static and dynamic stretching.

The function and significance of stretching before exercise are introduced. To sum up, it is mainly to make muscles, joints and other body tissues in a state suitable for exercise to ensure sports safety.