If you are doing body building you need to stretch.  It does not matter if you are doing light body building or a full blown muscle building exercise.  Stretching must be part of your goals in training.  Although you may not realize that benefits of training just yet, when you begin to incorporate it into your every day workouts, you will start to see the benefits that can happen to you.  Take a few minutes to learn why stretching and body building go hand in hand.

What It Does For You

Man or woman, stretching is an intricate part of the process of working out.  There are many things that it does for you in fact.  It helps in appearance, it lengthens your muscles, and it goes a long way to providing lean, toned looking muscles as well.  It can help to improve your fitness level and it will improve your overall health as well.  That’s a lot to gain from just a few minutes of stretching.  Of course, if you are at an event, it definitely helps you to show off those muscles as well!

If you incorporate stretching into your workout warm up, you will have an overall 50 percent reduction in overextension injuries.  This is well known in any athletic base and it holds true for body building as well.  In addition to providing you with this type of additional help, you will also find that stretching can aid in lessening the soreness that you feel after your workout as well.  

Start your workout with ballistic, light stretches.  Work on each of the areas of the body, one at a time to fully prepare them for what is to come.  Then, after your workout install a cool down stretching workout as well.  In this workout, try more static stretching.  This is the area in which you will gain the most benefit for relief from injury as well as the relief from soreness tomorrow.

Body building requires hard work but can provide your body will an intense benefit.  Look at several types of stretching and insure that the exercises that you will be doing after your warm up are fully prepared for with the right stretches beforehand.  You will find this to be an excellent warm up and cool down to virtually any body building workout you may do.

are you saying streching makes a good walm up?

Tankuk - while I think your advice, commitment and all round bodybuilding enthusiasm is absolutely spot on most of the time, I don't agree with this completely.

Stretching is a very important part of bodybuilding and in fact all sport. After all strength without flexibility is pointless and vise versa flexibility without strength is pointless. Simply put, what is the point of being able to pick up that heavy box if you cant bend over to get your arms round it.

So I agree with you on the stretching part, but there are a couple of points I am not so sure about.

I don't agree with stretching before a workout. Stretching should be done afterwards. If you think about what you are doing when you workout, you are contracting and flexing the muscles repetitively to bring about the pump, stretching afterwards helps to bring balance to this. It will bring on a greater range of movement for next time and thus benefit, but strecthing should always be done when the muscles are at their warmest.

Before you workout you should warm up of course, but not stretch. The warm up should be done in two parts, firstly you need to get the blood pumping and your heart rate up, 5 - 10mins on a cross trainer/treadmill or even a bike ride to the gym (not so good in the winter of course) the second part is mobilistation of the joints. For example if you are doing legs you could do some lunges or body squats, on shoulders or back day some shoulder rotations and trunk twists. 5mins is all that is needed really, but you must prepare the joints and ligaments by reminding them what is about to happen. Then obviously your warm up sets and so on.

The other thing is ballistic stretching is so bad, you should never bounce into a stretch. The rapid contraction/stretch action created whilst doing this is one of the easiest ways to cause muscle injury. You should always use the static stretch approach. That is using the correct form and work with your breathing. Once you are in the basic stretch position breath slowly and on the out breath sink slowly further into the stretch. You should be able to feel your stretch as you do this, try to relax then after a few more breathes the stretch should ease and you can sink again on the out breath. Be carefull not to use you strength to pull yourself into the stretch.

Just my 2P on the subject.

B.

After reading back i do agree.

Because i myself warm up on a cardio machine for 5-10mins then ill stretch that bodypart im going to be working on. I once sufferd from a shoulder injury and due to stretching before working on it i have reduced that injury.

I do think stretching is good,but ill amend that you should only do it on a warm muscle and never straight in.
I wrote before complety thinking then,

my bad

its a big man who admits hes wrong  

never never never ever ever ever strech a clod muscle. 'pop' arrrgh 'ne nor, ne nor'