Strength Training versus Flexibility Training: Which is Most Important to Daily Life?

By Joe Mullen

There can be no progress without a break in traditions. Otherwise, we'd still be living in caves. So it is in the exercise field. Unless tradition is challenged there can be no breakthroughs associated with exercise conditioning.

Many professionals and fitness enthusiasts strongly argue that flexibility (range-of-motion around a joint) is more important than strength. That point of view is popular among trainers, coaches and athletes alike.

For decades women in particular have overlooked the value of strength training. That man over shadow women in the strength arena is a commonly accepted fact.

The most potentially dangerous consequence, unfortunately, is that women can become the target of thugs, whose major line of offense (other than weapons) is usually superior strength.

Women often take self-defense classes to improve the odds. The odds would be more in a woman's favor, if she combined self-defense instruction with training for maximum strength.

The self-confidence accompanying increased strength, compared to being flexible, is sufficient to produce the required confidence, alertness and courageousness needed to walk the streets and meet all daily activity needs.

We believe strength is of more value than flexibility. We offer the following intellectual ammunition as the basis of our discussion; imagine the physical stature of Pee Wee Herman alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Picture Pee Wee attempting to twist and tear Arnold's arm off at the shoulder. There would be little or no movement in Arnold’s arm. Then, ask Arnold to do the same to Pee Wee’s arm.

Whose arm do you think would break and why? Is the outcome related to strength or flexibility?

After you accompany Pee Wee to the hospital to have his arm set in a cast, will you advise him to take more yoga classes to prevent this type of force-based injury or perhaps encourage him to tag along with Arnold to the weight room?

The importance of strength training versus flexibility training to prevent and rehabilitate injury has ramifications far beyond hypothetical arm twisting.

Rather, it goes to the heart of health and fitness training, athletic training, rehabilitation, physical therapy, work rehabilitation and injury prevention.

The American economy loses approximately $40 billion every year because of musculoskeletal problems related to the lumbar spine alone. Injuries that affect 80% of the work force, at some time in their lives.

We use the Pee Wee and Arnold image to illustrate that the body's ability to handle complex forces placed upon it and stressful biomechanical demands without injury, is almost always better served by building adequate and well balanced strength, rather than by simply becoming more limber.

Properly conditioned muscles can combat the long term stress placed upon them by everyday tasks and the tremendous amount of sudden impact force delivered from something as simple as a sneeze.

Impact force is simply: The weight of an object (your arm, leg, head, or torso), multiplied by the speed of its movement, when pushed, pulled, twisted, torqued or slammed into an object.

When the forces of your golf swing, tennis serve or running gait is no longer absorbed by your muscles (which act as the shock absorbers). The impact transfers to bones and joints. Injury is the very predictable result.

The flexibility of a yogi won't be able to prevent impact forces from applying torque to a body segment. Back problems are a particular problem for every class of American worker.

To understand the source, we need only visualize the stress we place on the back almost every minute we're not laying, sitting or standing in a correct, stress free position.

Sitting, slumped all day in your office chair or standing bent over at a counter produces muscular contraction, which when excessive will cause high levels of pain.

It can be likened to walking around, carrying a five pound object which you keep in a perpetual, contracted position of a biceps curl, hand help halfway to the shoulder with the weight in the hand.

Despite the objects relative lightness after a while the muscular strain will begin to show. At the end of such a day, you'll be reaching for the aspirin bottle seeking relief from the intense arm pain.

Similarity, when the back is forced to take on the kind of stress caused by a slightly forward leaning position, held throughout the day, it must constantly fight against gravity to hold your torso erect.

Extreme back pain may occur. The result of weak back muscles is most commonly seen in the elderly, whose back muscles can no longer support the torso weight in an erect position, as gravity pulls the torso forward into a stooped position.

This problem will be offset by a back strengthening program because the function of the back muscles is the pull to torso upward and backward.

With the lumbar spine and other body segments not genetically designed to handle the strain humans put on them daily, any exercise, therapy or rehabilitation protocol designed for back care must include direct, lower back related exercise.

While passive therapies such as stretching, massage and the like do nothing to improve lumbar spine strength, each has a role to play in a therapy program. Proper strength training will provide adequate structural integrity for the areas of the cervical spine and the lumbar spine.

Equally important as muscle strength is muscular balance. This is thought of as the relative function and balance of one side of the body compared to the other. This applies in a side to side as well as a back to front plane.

Don't think that being an active sports participant will improve the situation. The opposite is true. Witness the over developed and dominant body segments of golfers, tennis players and bowlers (as examples). It is no accident they display poor posture and have back, neck, shoulder, and elbow and wrist problems.

Unfortunately, most of them accept joint pain and poor posture as the cost of sports participation. Lack of strength, not lack of flexibility is the problem.

If we agree that muscular imbalance exists and it is caused by one side of the body being more dominant than the other, then it would make sense to design a workout program to focus on the NON-DOMINANT (weaker) areas and ignore the already dominant side.

At least until the weaker areas improve and are in closer relationship to the superior areas.

But, noooo! Instead, programs are followed which exercise sides, thereby improving each side, but doing nothing to improve functional muscular balance between each side of the body.

Each area improves but the imbalance ratio remains the same. Rather than eliminating the problem most programs continue on the right track but heading in the wrong direction.

High-Tech exercise machines and new concepts of exercise allow one to achieve maximum fitness in minimum time; however, proper use of this equipment and application of new techniques to improve fitness and functional ability are ignored by many.

If equal time is given to proper strength training as is flexibility training, work injuries, daily activity injuries and sports related injuries will be dramatically reduced or totally eliminated.