The short version: stretching right before a heavy lift costs a small amount of maximal strength, and more when each stretch is held for a minute or longer. Lifting through a full range of motion builds range on its own. Stretching has not been shown to reduce soreness in any meaningful way, and its effect on injury risk is unproven. An assisted session fits on a light day or a rest day, away from the sessions you care most about.
Lifters tend to ask about stretching with one worry in mind: will it cost strength? Close behind are questions about soreness, injuries, and whether a squat that stops short is a flexibility problem at all. This page takes those questions one at a time and says where the research is solid and where it is not.
Will stretching before a lift make me weaker?
A little, on tests of maximal strength, and the dose matters.
The most recent large analysis is a 2024 multilevel meta-analysis by Warneke and Lohmann in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, pooling 83 studies and 2,012 participants. Against passive controls, static stretching produced “a significant, small ES for a static stretch-induced maximal strength loss,” an effect size of −0.21. For stretches held 60 seconds or longer per bout, the loss was large, an effect size of −0.84. The authors wrote that for “strength testing of isolated muscles (e.g., leg extensions or calf raises), our results confirm previous findings.”
The same review found that stretching “did not negatively influence athletic performance in general,” and it recorded a small positive effect on jumping. Its authors argued against dropping static stretching from warm-ups before jumping or sprinting. For a lifter, the relevant half is the first one: maximal force from the stretched muscle dips for a while afterward.
An earlier review by Behm, Blazevich, Kay and McHugh in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism in 2016 reported the same dose pattern. Performance deficits were larger with static stretches held 60 seconds or more per muscle group (−4.6%) than under 60 seconds (−1.1%). Proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF), the contract-and-relax family used in partner and table stretching, showed a change of −4.4% when tested immediately afterward.
These studies measured stretching done as a warm-up, usually minutes before testing. None of them measured a 60-minute assisted session. That is a different dose, and the fair reading is that it is unlikely to leave you stronger for the next hour and may leave you somewhat weaker.
Where does an assisted session fit in a lifting week?
Put it where a small, temporary drop in force output does not matter. A rest day, a light technique day, or the day after your heaviest session all qualify. The day before a max attempt, a meet, or a test day does not.
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons puts the general principle this way in its Safe Exercise guidance: “Safe exercise programs start slowly and gradually build up in frequency, intensity, and duration.” A first assisted session, taken toward end range by someone else, is a new stimulus. Give the first two or three sessions more room in the calendar than you think they need, and see how you respond before placing one closer to a hard day.
How often to come back is a separate question, answered in how often you should book assisted stretching.
Does lifting cost you flexibility?
The evidence points the other way. Resistance training through a full range of motion adds range.
Afonso and colleagues compared strength training with stretching in a 2021 meta-analysis of randomized trials in Healthcare and found that the two “were not different in their effects on ROM,” while noting the studies were highly varied and more research was needed. Alizadeh and colleagues reached a similar conclusion in Sports Medicine in 2023 across 55 studies: resistance training increased range of motion, with no significant difference from stretch training, except when the only load was body weight. Their summary was that “stretching prior to or after resistance training may not be necessary to enhance flexibility.”
The AAOS guidance says the practical version: “During strength training, move through the full range of motion with each repetition.” A controlled deep squat, a full-depth split squat, or a Romanian deadlift to a real stretch is range work with load attached. If your lifts already reach the depth you want, a stretch session is optional. If they stop short in one position, that position is worth describing to someone, and hip mobility and assisted stretching goes further into why one direction can be limited while others are fine.
Does regular stretching hurt strength gains over time?
This is a different question from the warm-up one, and the answer is different too. Do not merge the two.
Two meta-analyses, from 2023 and 2024, looked at stretching programs lasting weeks rather than minutes. Arntz and colleagues, in Sports Medicine in 2023, pooled 41 studies and found “trivial-to-small positive effects of chronic SS exercises on muscle strength,” with larger gains in sedentary people than in recreationally active ones. Warneke and colleagues, in Sports Medicine – Open in 2024, pooled 42 studies and found small strength increases, describing chronic static stretching as “of minor effectiveness,” with larger effects from longer stretch durations and longer programs.
So there is no sign that a stretching habit undoes strength training, and some sign of a small effect in the other direction for people who are not already training. Those were repeated programs over weeks, mostly self-stretching. They say nothing about what a single appointment does for your numbers.
Does stretching help with soreness after a heavy session?
Not by a meaningful amount, according to the best available review.
A Cochrane systematic review by Herbert, de Noronha and Kamper, updated in 2011, pooled 12 studies of stretching before or after exercise. Stretching after exercise reduced soreness one day later by about one point on a 100-point scale. The authors concluded that muscle stretching, “whether conducted before, after, or before and after exercise, does not produce clinically important reductions in delayed-onset muscle soreness in healthy adults.”
That review is older than most of the others on this page, and it covered self-stretching rather than assisted work. We have not found a trial that changes its conclusion, and we do not claim an assisted session reduces soreness.
Does stretching prevent lifting injuries?
That has not been shown. It has not been disproved either, and the difference matters.
Behm’s 2016 review found that static and PNF stretching “had no clear effect on all-cause or overuse injuries.” The same review still recommended stretching inside a warm-up that includes dynamic activity afterward, partly for reducing muscle injuries. Researchers who read the same evidence reach different emphases, and the trials are too varied to settle it. Our position is that injury prevention from stretching is unproven, and this service makes no claim about it.
Is the extra range you feel afterward real?
It is real, and it is mostly short-lived. Behm’s 2016 review found range-of-motion improvements from a stretching bout “typically lasting <30 min.”
Why range improves is still argued over. The same review offered two explanations side by side: changes “may result from acute reductions in muscle and tendon stiffness or from neural adaptations causing an improved stretch tolerance.” The first is a change in the tissue. The second is a change in how far the nervous system lets you go before the stretch feels like too much. Nobody can tell you which one happened after an hour on a table, and mobility, flexibility and range of motion sets out the vocabulary behind that distinction.
New range also needs strength to be usable. Passive range on a table does not train control at that position. For a lifter, the place to own new range is under the bar, loaded and controlled.
What happens in an assisted session?
You lie on a padded table and the practitioner moves the limb while you stay relaxed, with straps holding one side still so the other can be isolated. Stretch to Win, which developed Fascia Stretch Therapy, describes the work as improving “mobility, flexibility, and stability” and says it is “done on padded tables with stabilization straps.” That is the method developer’s description of its own method, not an independent research finding. We looked for studies of the method by name and found none.
The practical difference from stretching in the gym is positioning. A second person can hold the pelvis or rib cage still while moving the hip or shoulder, which is hard to do alone. Assisted stretching compared with stretching on your own goes through that trade in full.
What helps most is how you describe your training. Name the lifts, where you are in your current block, and when the next heavy day or test is. Describe positions rather than labels: “my heels come up at the bottom of a squat” or “I cannot get the bar overhead without arching my lower back” gives a practitioner more to work with than “my hips are tight.” Then say what hurts, separately. Tightness and pain lead to different places.
When to see a clinician first
Some of what lifters call tightness is not. See a physician, physical therapist, or chiropractor before booking a stretch session if you have pain during or after a lift that you cannot explain, pain that started suddenly under load, pain that changes how you move, numbness or tingling in an arm or leg, a current injury, or restrictions a clinician has already given you.
The AAOS also advises contacting your doctor before beginning vigorous physical activity if you have an existing health problem such as high blood pressure or diabetes, a history of heart disease, or you smoke. Its line on rest applies here as well: “Fatigue, significant muscle soreness, and pain are good reasons to not exercise.”
A stretch practitioner can describe how a joint moves. Working out why it hurts needs a license and a scope this service does not have. What fascia stretch therapy cannot do sets out those limits.
What an appointment does not replace
The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans advise that adults “should also do muscle-strengthening activities of moderate or greater intensity and that involve all major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.” Lifters usually meet that part already. An hour of assisted stretching is not strength training and does not count toward it, and assisted stretching for runners covers the same point from the endurance side.
Booking a session
What fascia stretch therapy is explains the method, and who fascia stretch therapy is for covers whether it suits you. The Services page lists the 60-minute session at $120, the About page covers Greg’s background and his Stretch to Win FST Level 2 certification, and the Programs page explains how a session is structured. Sessions are offered in Universal City and the greater San Antonio area.
Fascia stretch therapy here is a wellness and performance service. It does not diagnose a condition, provide medical treatment, or replace care from a physician, physical therapist, chiropractor, or other licensed healthcare professional. No session comes with a guaranteed result.
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