Practical recommendations on stretching exercise: A Delphi consensus statement of international research experts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Stretching has wide appeal, but there seems to exist some mismatch between its purported applications and what the evidence shows. There is compelling evidence for some stretching applications, but for others, the evidence seems heterogeneous or unsupportive. The discrepancies even affect some systematic reviews, possibly due to heterogeneous eligibility criteria and search strategies. This consensus paper seeks to unify the divergent findings on stretching and its implications for both athletic performance and clinical practices by delivering evidence-based recommendations. METHODS: A panel of 20 experts with a blend of practical experience and scholarly knowledge was assembled. The panel meticulously reviewed existing systematic reviews, defined key terminologies (e.g., consensus definitions for different stretching modes), and crafted guidelines using a Delphi consensus approach (minimum required agreement: 80%). The analysis focused on 8 topics, including stretching's acute and chronic (long-term) effects on range of motion, strength performance, muscle hypertrophy, stiffness, injury prevention, muscle recovery, posture correction, and cardiovascular health. RESULTS: There was consensus that chronic and acute stretching (a) improves range of motion (although alternatives exist) and (b) reduces muscle stiffness (which may not always be desirable); the panel also agreed that chronic stretching (c) may promote vascular health, but more research is warranted. In contrast, consensus was found that stretch training does not (a) contribute substantively to muscle growth, (b) serve as an all-encompassing injury prevention strategy, (c) improve posture, or (d) acutely enhance post-exercise recovery. CONCLUSION: These recommendations provide guidance for athletes and practitioners, highlighting research gaps that should be addressed to more comprehensively understand the full scope of stretching effects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".