Stretching Can Be Part of a Warm-Up, but Injury Prevention Is a Different Question

Stretching before exercise can feel like a form of protection. Loosen the muscles, get some movement back, and perhaps the body will be less likely to get hurt once the workout starts. The logic feels intuitive, but what kind of injury-prevention question has the research actually tested?

Available research has not established that a single bout of stretching immediately before exercise reduces injury risk during that same session. A 2025 international consensus on stretching noted that studies often described as “pre-exercise stretching” have generally involved stretching performed repeatedly across training periods. Those designs can examine injury rates over weeks or months, but they cannot cleanly isolate whether stretching immediately before one workout made that particular session safer.¹

Longer-term stretching research has also produced cautious results. In a broader meta-analysis of 25 randomized injury-prevention trials involving more than 26,000 participants, only three studies contributed to the stretching subgroup. Their pooled result did not show a significant reduction in overall injury risk. Other exercise-based prevention strategies in the review showed more favorable effects, but the limited stretching evidence does not support a broad conclusion that stretching alone prevents sports injuries.²

That does not mean stretching has been ruled out for every type of injury. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of static-stretching interventions found a lower incidence of muscle injuries among participants assigned to stretching, while no significant reduction was found for tendon injuries. The evidence base was small, however: only four randomized trials were eligible, and only three contributed muscle-injury data. The 2025 consensus also cautioned that any apparent reduction in muscle injuries could, in some of the underlying evidence, be offset by more bone and joint injuries. That makes the finding difficult to interpret as a broad injury-prevention benefit.^1,3

The 2025 consensus therefore did not treat stretching as an all-purpose injury-prevention strategy. Instead, it acknowledged the possibility of a more specific effect on muscle injuries while emphasizing the limited and uneven evidence. It also highlighted a separate problem: research involving stretching performed repeatedly over time cannot tell us whether the stretch performed immediately before a particular workout reduced injury risk during that session.^1,3

A warm-up is a different intervention from stretching alone. Injury-prevention warm-up programs often combine several components, such as strength exercises, balance or neuromuscular work, aerobic movement, agility or sport-specific drills, and sometimes stretching. A 2022 meta-analysis of 15 studies involving 21,576 children and adolescents found that these multicomponent programs were associated with lower sports-injury rates overall. Because several elements were delivered together, and because the evidence came from younger sporting populations, the findings cannot identify stretching as the protective ingredient or be assumed to apply identically to every exercising adult.⁴

Stretching can still serve other purposes before activity. The 2025 consensus concluded that stretching can increase range of motion both acutely and with repeated practice. But an increase in range of motion and a reduction in injury risk are different outcomes. Evidence that a stretch allows more movement does not, by itself, demonstrate that it prevents injuries in the workout that follows.¹

That distinction matters when deciding what stretching is expected to accomplish. A few pre-workout stretches should not be treated as proof that the coming session is protected from injury, and evidence from a complete multicomponent warm-up cannot be reduced to whether stretching was included. The research supports a more limited interpretation of what stretching alone can currently be said to do for injury prevention.^1,2,3,4

Stretching can be useful before exercise without needing to prevent injuries on its own. The evidence supports separating those two questions: what helps prepare a movement, and what has actually been shown to reduce injury risk.