Stretching and Mobility

What It Is

Regular stretching, flexibility, and mobility work, done as exercise in its own right.

Why It Matters

Stretching is one of the most popular forms of exercise, second only to walking in one national survey, and the people who do it tend to live longer.¹ In the study that best separates it from everything else people do, adults who stretched died at a lower rate even after accounting for walking, lifting, and every other kind of exercise it asked about, though the evidence is very uncertain about whether stretching itself is the reason.¹ A national Korean cohort found the same direction without accounting for other exercise,² and in a US cohort that did account for it, the difference was too uncertain to tell apart from none.³

What those studies cannot separate is the stretching from the people who stretch. A little stretching went with lower risk, but more stretching brought no further drop,¹ and who reports stretching is not random: the authors of the US study suggest people with limited mobility may be more likely to report it, which would bias results the other way.³ A Cochrane review found no trial of stretching against doing nothing on falls; trials use it as the comparison instead, and in one, older adults at high risk of falling on a stretching program had far more serious injurious falls than those doing tai chi or a mixed balance and strength program.^4,5 The striking numbers attached to the floor-sitting test, sitting down and standing up without your hands, come from a single exercise clinic in Rio de Janeiro, in a study that adjusted only for age, sex, and body mass index and could not account for how active people were.⁶

None of this makes stretching a bad idea. If it keeps you moving comfortably, eases stiffness, or helps you reach a full range of motion in your lifts, keep doing it. It just isn't, on the evidence so far, something we can put a number on and ask every reader to track, and in the one trial above it lost clearly to strength and balance work.⁵

• 1 Sheehan, C.M., Li, L. (2020). Associations of Exercise Types with All-Cause Mortality among U.S. Adults. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0000000000002406
• 2 Cho, Y. et al. (2023). Aerobic, muscle-strengthening, and flexibility physical activity and risks of all-cause and cause-specific mortality: a population-based prospective cohort of Korean adults. BMC Public Health. doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-15969-1
• 3 Porter, A.K. et al. (2020). Participation in specific leisure-time activities and mortality risk among US adults. Annals of Epidemiology. doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2020.06.006
• 4 Sherrington, C. et al. (2019). Exercise for preventing falls in older people living in the community. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012424.pub2
• 5 Li, F. et al. (2019). Effectiveness of Tai Ji Quan vs Multimodal and Stretching Exercise Interventions for Reducing Injurious Falls in Older Adults at High Risk of Falling. JAMA Network Open. doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.8280
• 6 de Brito, L.B.B. et al. (2014). Ability to sit and rise from the floor as a predictor of all-cause mortality. European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. doi.org/10.1177/2047487312471759