Monday Wellness Reflection

Link to Google Presentation:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qbXs8aSpLjKF9leBtxv0DF8mW3iA1LOpTTMSozO2xdA/edit?usp=sharing

For our Monday Wellness Project, Cassi and I chose stretching because it is a really interesting topic and I feel that a lot of athletes don’t stretch because they think it is a waste of time. However, I wanted to inform the class that stretching does help and it should be done before and after exercise for many benefits that were discussed in the presentation. From our research on stretching, we learned that muscles need to be well circulated and healthy. A normal person spends most of the day in the same position. If people avoid stretching, their muscles will continue to fatigue. As a result of not stretching, people decrease their circulation and flexibility. As an athlete myself, I found this research very fascinating because before this presentation, I would rarely stretch before practice because I always thought that stretching was a waste of time. However, this presentation taught me that stretching is beneficial and now, I stretch before and after practice and games. Our Monday Wellness project has really inspired me to stretch myself.

The most interesting things that we learned while preparing for the presentation was Brad Walker’s research that explains that the current research on stretching is flawed. As we were looking through research, we noticed that a lot of the research done on stretching was done in the same way: two groups, one stretching and the other not stretching. This led us to Brad Walker’s article that talks about the flawed research because stretching shows effects after a long period of time. Also, we found that changing stretches too often, called “bouncing,” is not beneficial. This fact was very interesting to me because usually when I stretch, I would change my stretches often to get it over with, but now I know that doing that is not effective and shows no beneficial results. 

Stretching is important for health and wellness because it increases flexibility, increases range of motion, improves circulation, promotes better posture, etc. Stretching is very important and athletes should not just skip stretching because it is very beneficial. I think stretching should be enforced more in sports because it is very useful and ultimately helps people’s overall wellness. 

Overall, I would give our presentation a high 8 or low 9 out of ten because even though we spent a lot of time preparing for our presentation, we put too many videos in our presentation. This was not effective; instead, we should have just talked about the major points in the videos. I think that we should have explained more of the anatomy of the different stretches so students can understand how the major muscle groups work during stretching. We should have made the presentation more interactive so students would not get bored during our presentation. Also, I think that our information was very helpful and I hope people now understand that they should spend more time stretching. I feel that a lot of students don’t do stretches properly, mostly because they are too lazy, so I hoped that the stretches we did during class showed them the most effective ways to stretch in order to get the full effects of the stretch.