Fascial Stretching for Greater Muscle Growth

As you progress in your lifting career, you probably notice it becomes increasingly harder to add more muscle to your frame. By adding a stretching routine upon completion of each exercise, you can break that forever-long plateau you’ve been stuck in.

How exactly will stretching allow for additional muscle growth? Well, let’s dive deeper into muscular physiology to see just how stretching will induce greater gains in the future. You see, we have a fascial tissue that surrounds the spindles of fibers that make up the skeletal muscles in our body. Over time, this tissue gets more and more tense, especially if you have added an appreciable amount of mass over the past few years. This is where stretching comes into play. When you stretch following a workout, you allow for the fascial tissue encasements to expand beyond the norm (which is a good thing I might add), leaving room for additional muscle growth to fill in the extra space. This is very beneficial for hypertrophy (when the muscle cells enlarge) and newer studies are revealing that stretching may induce hyperplasia too (an increase in the number of muscle cells).

To get the most out of stretching, I’d recommended stretching immediately following the exercise of the target muscle group you are working. For instance, if you’ve just completed an exercise that worked your hamstrings, you’d want to straddle your leg over something and perform a hurdle stretch or something of that sort. If you are working chest, you would perform a chest flye on a flat bench with dumbbells, only this time you would be holding the dumbbells at the bottom position of the flye. Lats- hang from a pullup bar. So on and so forth. Hold each stretch maximally for 60-90 seconds and that’s all you’ll need. Just make sure you aren’t bouncing and that you ease into maximum stretch, so as to not pull or tear any muscle.

I found that despite my huge gains in leg strength and size, I am still able to kick my foot all the way up to my forehead or touch my nose to my knee. I can also touch my hand to my mid-back without problems, so there’s no doubt in my mind that fascial stretching works. You won’t just benefit from additional room for muscle growth, you’ll also be much more limber and flexible with less joint problems, aches, and pains.