Which Is Better for Warming Up?

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Touching your toes. The standing quad hold. The overhead tricep stretch. These are the static positions our high school gym teachers taught us to warm up with before engaging in any physical activity. But to adequately prime your body for movement—whether you’re biking to work or trekking up a mountain—you have to actually get moving.

“Why would you do something passive to improve something active?” says Grayson Wickham, a doctor of physical therapy and the founder of Movement Vault, a mobility and stretching app. Dynamic stretching, he explains, “happens when you are moving your muscles from a shortened to a lengthened position by moving your joint in a specific direction.”

Dynamic stretches are best for warming up. These controlled movements mimic the exercises you’re about to perform in your workout, with a slower, more deliberate pace. For example, before a run, you might do a few walking high knees and arm swings. If you’re climbing, you may spend more time practicing hip-opening rotations and shoulder rolls. These movements will increase overall blood flow and minimize muscle and joint stiffness, which can improve force and power production during exercise.

But dynamic stretching can also help you move more easily through everyday tasks like running errands or doing household chores. “Dynamic stretching should be done every morning, not just because you’re going to work out and not just because you’re athletic, but because you’re a human,” says Marnie Adler, a Pilates instructor based in Toronto, Ontario. For the last decade her work has focused on helping clients move with greater mobility and stability, beginning workouts with purposeful dynamic stretching before progressing into more difficult moves. “It’s about getting your body moving, no matter what your plan is for the day,” she adds.

Static vs. Dynamic Stretching: Which Is Better?

Most studies on the impact of different types of stretching have small sample sizes. But the available research indicates that dynamic stretching improves range of motion and increases your heart rate, which better prepares your muscles for action. By decreasing muscle stiffness and increasing joint flexibility, dynamic stretching also helps prevent exercise-induced injuries.

Analyzing more than two decades of research on the topic, the authors of a 2011 review published in the European Journal of Applied Psychology suggest that an optimal warm-up should include low-intensity aerobic work, followed by both dynamic stretching and sport-specific dynamic movements.

Static stretching, on the other hand, involves “stretching out a muscle and joint and then simply relaxing into the hold,” Wickham says.

Although many of us were taught to hold these positions before exercising, a growing body of research suggests that this style of warm-up can negatively impact force production, endurance, speed, power, and strength. A 2012 study in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports found that static stretching reduced cyclists’ mechanical efficiency and caused them to tire out faster.

“From a physiologic perspective, static stretching is just passively elongating your connective tissues,” Wickham says. “After static stretching you now have a more flexible, floppy joint that lacks end range of motion stability, muscle activation, and joint control. This is a great recipe for injury as you now have even poorer joint control while performing an exercise or athletic movement.”

Wickham doesn’t consider static stretching a critical part of post-workout recovery, either, but he notes that it can be added during a rest day as a relaxation strategy.

The Moves

Adler suggests performing this set of dynamic moves before any workout or choosing the ones that best support your activity. You can also do them upon waking and before bed to mitigate muscle stiffness from sleeping or spending time sitting. The static moves can be done on a rest day or after your workout is complete.