Stretches After Running - Women's Fitness

Stretches After Running - part of the women's fitness video series by GeoBeats. Stretches After Running At the end of your run you want to do more static stretches. Your body’s all warmed up, obviously, because you’ve just run, so now you can really get a little bit deeper and hold those stretches longer. Think about yoga. Things like that will help you recover after your run. This is a quadriceps stretch. The quadriceps are the muscles here at the front of your thighs. What I’ve done is I’m taking my right leg with my left arm. You want to try to use the opposite arm. It helps keep the muscle in alignment. If you use the same arm, the leg tends to fly out in the wrong direction. So, you just want to hold this position for about 20 seconds. It’s fine to hold on to something for stability if you need to. In order to stretch your IT band, which is a band of tendon from the hip all the way down to the knee, it’s your largest tendon in your body, in order to stretch this IT band, take your right leg and bring it in front of the left. Now, take your left arm and pull it over your body. See that? When you’re doing that, you’re stretching the IT band on the back leg. The next stretch we want to do is for your hamstrings. Put your foot out in front of you and imagine you’re sitting down into a chair. You’re going to get the back of your thigh, which is your hamstring muscle. You can also add in your calf a little bit by pulling up on your toes. Feels good. Finally, you want to stretch out your calves. A good way to do this is to find something to lean on, such as this tree right here, and just push back. So, first do this with the heel down on the leg that you’re stretching. Then, with that same leg slightly bend the knee. It’s a very small movement, but that brings the stretch down to the smaller muscles around your Achilles tendon, which is right at your angle.