Stretching is important, it “keeps your body ready for movement” (Anderson 66). And seeing as humans are almost always on the move, we should incorporate stretching into our everyday lives. There are misconceptions that only people who do physical activities should stretch, but that is not true. Whether you just walk to your car and sit all day at work or are a marathon runner, stretching will be beneficial to your body. Here are some examples of what stretching can do for the body: your body can adjust to everyday situations easier, as you age it will keep “your body limber” (77), “promote circulation” in the body (11), and helps to prevent injury.
This is a study to find out the change in the hamstring muscle after a short warm-up in high school students. To do that we will test the distance the hamstring stretches from when the muscle is cold to when it is warm.
A cold muscle is a muscle that has neither been stretched nor has done any strenuous physical activity in the past few hours. The warm muscle is not the muscle after a full workout, but after only a warm-up. For our purposes, the warm-up distance will be the same for all test subjects, two laps around our track (or 800 meters). A good warm-up should be longer than this, about 10-20 minutes (Higdon 35), but having high school volunteers run that much of a warm-up is not likely to happen.
To measure the distance we will be using a very large protractor that is used by doctors. We will measure from the top of the greater trochanter when the test subject is lying on their stomach and one foot is dangling (Reid 603). So the distance that we are measuring is really the angle change from the cold muscle to the warm muscle.
There was a related study done on the “extensibility of the plantar flexors” (Knight). They used several different methods of warming-up to see what effect they had on the plantar flexor. Ultimately, they found that the group who had ultra sound done on the plantar flexor prior to stretching, had “the greatest increase in ankle dorsiflexion.” We are hoping to find that a running warm-up will do something similar for the hamstring muscle.
Our hypothesis is that the angle of the warm muscle will be greater than the angle for the cold muscle, when applying the same force to the hamstring. To test this hypothesis, we will be gathering test subjects from high school students only. To ensure that we are testing a variety of different students, we will draw volunteers from the following categories: male, female, athletic, non-athletic, Senior, Junior, Sophomore, and Freshman.
1. 50-Newton scale.
2. Body protractor.
3. Raised hard surface (counter top of the Concessions stand is what we used).
4. Running surface (½ a mile).
5. Data table.
6. People of different ages, gender, and athletic ability.
1. Start with one person.
2. Determine their sex, athleticism, and class by asking them questions, and record the information in the data table.
3. Have that person lie with their left side on the side of the counter top, having their arms stretched out in front of them and their right leg dangling over the edge.
4. By use of a string, attach the Newton scale to their right ankle.
5. Pull on the scale until the person can feel a good stretch on their leg.
6. At that point, apply the body protractor and measure the number of degrees.
7. Record the force used and the degrees in the data table.
8. Help the person off the counter top, and have them jog ½ of a mile at a comfortable pace.
9. Immediately after they have finished, measure them again to find the change in degrees, repeating steps 3-7.
10. Test another person, repeating steps 1-9
Click here for diagram of the lab
