Back in December I made a post covering a research on static stretching that can be found here. It may seem from this article that static stretching is the only way to go, especially when wanting to increase performance and flexibility. I even had a follow up post on 30 secs holds being ideal here with a research article backing it up. After talking one of my colleagues with whom I play basketball with is I might be giving the idea that static stretching is good all the time. In 9/10 times it is. There is one big exception and it is a very important one at that.
Static stretches should not be performed right before strength/conditioning or sports activities. Why? 3 reasons. They actually have been found to reduce performance or as the article below states there was no significant difference in no warm up and static warm up in most of the performance tests. It also is commonly accepted that stretching right before an event can elongate a muscle and put it at higher risk for injury. Lastly those who understand muscles and mechanisms of muscle strain like physical therapists will simply shake their heads at you in disgust and you don't want that, right?
So that sounds like you shouldn't do anything to before these activities. Well, that's not true either. Dynamic stretching was reported to have significant increases in all the performance tests used in this study. So what is the big take home message here? Perform dynamic stretches before the activity and get into a regular static stretch routine weekly(just not right before you are going to do strenuous activities). If you need some ideas on Dynamic stretching, the article link below has a few in their protocol on Table 1 with descriptions on how to perform them. Other dynamic exercise ideas.
Article link below
DYNAMIC VS. STATIC-STRETCHING WARM UP: THE EFFECT ON POWER AND AGILITY PERFORMANCE
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