Half an hour of stretching a day gave tight hamstrings no clear edge over a few minutes

Most stretching advice for stiff legs carries a quiet assumption: if a little helps, more will help more. A small trial published on 28 September put that idea to a direct test in people in their sixties and seventies, and the extra half hour a day did not show up where most of us would expect it to.

Thirty minutes against three

The study comes from a team at Burapha University in Chonburi, Thailand, working with a colleague in Lithuania (European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2026). They recruited 68 adults living at home, average age about 67, all with tight hamstrings and early signs of the muscle loss that tends to come with age. For six weeks, at home, one group held static stretches for 30 minutes every day. A second group stretched for 3 minutes, three days a week. A third did slow lowering strength work (eccentric exercise, where the muscle works while it lengthens), and a fourth carried on as usual.

Put the two stretching doses side by side and the gap is enormous: 210 minutes a week against nine. Both groups gained range. The long stretchers added about 12.4 degrees on the range test, the short stretchers about 10.3, and the researchers could not find a real difference between the two.

Three things keep this in proportion. The groups were small, around 17 people each, and the trial wasn't built to prove the two doses are equal; the authors say plainly that equivalence was not established. When they set the stretching groups against the people who did nothing, the extra range came in below the smallest change their test can reliably pick up, so the gain itself is modest. And range was the only thing stretching moved, because the measured stiffness of the muscle and tendon, the thickness of the muscle, balance on a reaching test and everyday physical function all stayed much where they were in every group that stretched, which is a long list of things a person might hope thirty daily minutes would buy. The strength group did get stronger, by a clear margin over the people who did nothing, though the gain stayed in the trained leg.

So the result is narrow but useful. For range in tight hamstrings after 60, a few minutes a week seems to have done about as much as half an hour a day. Neither dose made the tissue itself any less stiff.

A learning problem

To me that last detail matters more than the headline. If the muscle didn't get less stiff, what changed? The likeliest answer is older than this trial. In 2010 Charles Weppler and Peter Magnusson reviewed the stretching research and concluded that most of the extra length people gain over weeks of stretching comes from a change in sensation, a greater tolerance for the stretch, rather than from muscles that are physically longer (Physical Therapy, 2010). The nervous system moves its stop sign a little further out.

Seen through the Feldenkrais Method®, that's a learning problem, not a tissue problem. Something in you is deciding, moment by moment, how far it's safe to let the leg go. My guess is that it learns from the quality of what you do at least as much as from the minutes, and three calm minutes in which nothing is forced may teach it as well as thirty spent pulling against a guard.

The practice below is short on purpose. It asks the back of the leg to lengthen without asking you to pull.

What I see again and again in my classes is that people with stiff legs arrive expecting to be told to stretch harder, and grow a little suspicious when the work gets smaller. Then they stand, walk across the room, and one leg seems to meet the floor differently from the other. Often the change shows up first around the hip, not where they were pulling. That isn't proof of anything. It does point the same way as this trial.

A few practical notes, held loosely. If a physiotherapist has given you a stretching routine, this sits alongside it, not in place of it. If your goal is strength, the trial is a reminder that stretching didn't build any, while the slow strength work did. And if you've been treating loss of flexibility after 50 as a muscle that has run out of length, it may be worth considering that part of what's missing is permission. If you'd like more practices built that way, I've gathered what Feldenkrais exercises for seniors look like, and how they differ from a stretching routine.

Nobody in the trial was asked what those last few degrees felt like: whether they arrived as a pull, or as a quiet sense that the leg could go a little further. I'd love to know which group felt more of the second.