Andrew Huberman

You would want to do three sets

of static stretching for the hamstring.

You would do that by holding the stretch for 30 seconds, resting some period of time, then doing it again, holding for 30 seconds, resting some period of time, and then holding it for 30 seconds.

That would be one training session for the hamstrings.

I have to imagine that you'd probably want to stretch other muscle groups as well in that same session.

So three sets of 30 seconds each,

You get 90 seconds and you would do that ideally five times a week, or maybe even more.

One thing that did show up in my exploration of the peer reviewed research is this notion of warming up for all this.

We haven't talked about that yet.

In general, to avoid injury, it's a good idea to raise your core body temperature a bit before doing these kinds of stretches, even these static stretches, which we can sort of ease into and don't involve ballistic movement by definition.

And the basic takeaway that I was able to find was that if we are already warm from running or from weight training or from some other activity, that doing the static stretching practice at the end of that

or cardiovascular or other physical session would allow us to go immediately into the stretching session because we're already warm, so to speak.

Otherwise, raising one's core body temperature by a bit, by doing five to seven, maybe even 10 minutes of easy cardiovascular exercise or calisthenic movements, provided you can do those without getting injured,

seems to be an ideal way to warm up the body for stretching.

We should be warm or warm up to stretch, although those warmups don't have to be extremely extensive.

And then just by way of logic, doing the static stretching after resistance training or cardiovascular training seems to be most beneficial.

In fact, and unfortunately we don't have time to go into this in too much detail today, I was able to find a number of papers that make the argument that static stretching prior to cardiovascular training, and maybe even prior to

resistance training can limit our performance in running and resistance training.

I realize that's a controversial area.

You have those who say, no, it's immensely beneficial.