Originally Posted by Jordo!

hmm. That sounds good. In the absence of that, I'd argue for fairly light stretching before and more after, and/or in between sets. Hyper stretching will definitely loosen things up too much, so I'm not surprised of hear of evidence that it leads to injuries if people overdo it.

The "no pre-stretching" idea was based on fairly recent data that the tighter ligaments had more potential energy and therefore actually burned more calories when stretched during exercise rather than before.

I feel that is probably adequate advice for fit and reasonably flexible individuals (and irrelevant for ballet dancers and trained fighters or gymnasts). But newbies should definitely at least do some modest warm up stretches, if nothing else because figuring out the interval between "not enough" and "too much exertion" will be ill defined.

The foam roller probably works really well. Nothing like that at my gym that I am aware of, sadly...