Finally, you should follow this with some old fashioned stretching. There are many schools of thought when it comes to stretching and none has been proven more or less effective than the other except for ballistic stretching, which should be avoided. This is the type of stretching that involves bouncing or rapid and short stretch-release patterns. To keep it simple and easy, you can follow a static stretch routine of 20 to 30 second holds for each muscle group. You are now ready to begin exercising.
Once your exercise bout is complete, you should repeat the SMR and finish by stretching your muscles again. The SMR pushes the biochemical byproducts that have accumulated in your muscles from exercising out of the muscle and back into the circulatory system so they can be "cleaned up" and the stretching helps to restore muscle length closer to the original anatomical length and reverses the shortening that results from repetitive use. This allows for faster recovery and lessens the occurrence of repetitive stress injuries.
Of course, this inevitable question always comes up: "Who has time for all that?"
As mentioned earlier, this is a process that demands additional time from the athlete. However, once you consider how this may make the difference of being side-lined versus remaining in the game, as well as the time and cost of treatment and rehab; it quickly begins to make more sense to follow this routine than not. There are shorter versions that can be implemented and although they are not as effective, they do still aid in accomplishing the desired outcome to some extent. The abbreviated outline of the above process and some variations of it are as follows:
Best: warm up -> SMR -> stretch -> exercise -> SMR -> stretch
Better: warm up -> stretch -> exercise -> SMR -> stretch
Good: warm up -> stretch -> exercise -> stretch
OK: warm up -> exercise -> stretch
Bare Minimum: warm up -> exercise
Bad Idea: stretch cold and exercise without a proper warm up