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Came across this video: I only skipped through it because it is quite long. It points to faults in training that lead to damage. It reminds me of a friend who was trained as a rhythmic gymnast in the early/mid 1990s. She said they were encouraged to sit on each other in straddle splits, or the teacher pushed them. This may sound OK, but apparently there was NO KNOWLEDGE of the role of turnout in allowing hip abduction. They didnt bother to turn out. One girl had her pelvis fractured, and has been left with reproductive issues ever since. She said she didnt blame her teachers, because "they were only teaching how they had been taught themselves." This is inexcusable; even I as an amateur knew about the role of turnout many years before. It makes you wonder about the level of training of gymnastics teachers (in gyms by the way, maybe those who teach in schools have proper qualifications). I hope they are better informed now. The video had a mention of this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29506306/ (Thomas et al 2018; The Relation Between Stretching Typology and Stretching Duration: The Effects on Range of Motion) - available free if you go to the "pirate" science literature website at https://sci-hub.se/ and put in the reference, I find it easiest to use the DOI which Pubmed tells me for this paper is DOI: 10.1055/s-0044-101146). The paper amalgamated results from a large number of studies on hamstring stretching. The age range of the subjects was 10-46, and the duration of the training sessions varied from 4-16 weeks. The results were analysed into active stretching (held stretches with the stretch held by the antagonist muscle), passive stretching, ballistic stretching, and PNF stretching. Where no distinction in the papers was made between the first two types (how could anyone report results like this???) they just put them in a category called static stretching. The results were that active, passive and static stretching were best and statistically indistinguishable from each other in their effects (not surprising as the categories seem to overlap), ballistic stretching was worst, and PNF (from descriptions it seems to refer to what we call CR stretching) in between. Also, increases in flexibility were greatest the more days you did/week, up to 6 and dropping at 7 days. Time spent stretching was the critical factor, not the length of number of each session independently of that, but while 5 minutes total PER WEEK was better than less time, there was no improvement with longer times. Well some of this experience differs from what has been described in the ST community. 6 days/week best? It suggests they're not stretching hard enough. PNF worse? CR has shown itself of proven benefit in ST. I suspect that amalgamating a lot of studies done differently and with different subjects and conditions leads to - let us be frank - nonsense results. Also, even the longest times - 16 weeks - is very short to produce anatomical changes in the muscles (in contrast to adaptations of the nervous system to stretch sensations). So I wouldn't act on the findings of this paper, and am just posting it as a warning. There are some results that seem reasonable to me - from my detailed experience (n=1). Ballistic stretching is poor (for me at least). I am surprised that 5 minutes/week (on a single hamstring) is as good as longer times, but maybe that is true. I certainly spend longer than that stretching but once I divide it up into all the different things I am stretching, maybe it comes out to that figure. Jim.