I run 30-40 miles a week and lift 4 days a week. I get tension in the muscles every now and then and I get a massage to help with it. Stretching does NOTHING to prevent injury unless that injury is a direct result of lack of flexibility. Yes, stretching may help you if you have poor hip flexors but I specifically stated that lifters may benefit from some stretching. Runners, on the other hand, are NEVER benefited from stretching because flexibility is never an issue for them. In fact, runners tend to perform worse because of stretching.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1250267/
Conclusions: The data on stretching and muscle soreness indicate that, on average, individuals will observe a reduction in soreness of less than 2 mm on a 100-mm scale during the 72 hours after exercise. With respect to risk of injury, the combined risk reduction of 5% indicates that the stretching protocols used in these studies do not meaningfully reduce lower extremity injury risk of army recruits undergoing military training.
http://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Ab...ost_and.2.aspx
Practical Applications
Static stretching has been used during the warm-up routine of several athletes. However, our results show that static stretching may impair endurance performance up to 60 minutes and increase caloric expenditure. Even though the increments in caloric expenditure were low (~5%), it may produce some advantage to the runner at the end of close competitions. Therefore, static stretching should be avoided before endurance events, at least for young male endurance runners. The effect of other forms of stretching (i.e., dynamic stretching) on endurance performance remains to be tested.
Please stop speaking out of your moronic and uneducated ass. Thanks.