PornMD

I agree with the very first comment on it:

"The study does not look at all at the effects on tendons - where the muscles attach to bones - which is where the major problems occur that runners suffer. I had one Achilles tendon surgically repaired and the other slowly healed on it own. To this day, if I do NOT stretch, I get tendonitis in that self-healed tendon. Additionally, most people do NOT stretch correctly. You should take a slow jog first. When I coached high school track, cross country, or softball athletes (up to 2002) I had them run SLOWLY over a half mile. If they ran too fast, they were made to do it again. THEN, with the muscles relaxed, slow, static stretches are done. You do not FORCE your body to stretch, you simply go as far as the body wants you to go in a relaxed manner and hold it for at least 15 seconds. I once taught my cross country kids the first steps of Tai Chi (which I had learned on a trip to China that summer) and began stretches with that, but the kids rebelled saying the other teams thought they were weird! If you travel through China, you see the Chinese doing Tai Chi and similar exercises every morning. Even on Yangtze River Cruise, as we did our pre-breakfast exercises on the deck of our ship we passed small towns where hundreds of people in many groups had gathered alongside the river to do their exercises. Most Chinese don't make a lot of money and the exercises are part of their PREVENTIVE medicine. Stretching does the same for us. Yes, there may be microtears in some muscles, but they heal quickly and prevent accumulations of slow-healing microtears in the tendons. And the idea that it requires 5% more energy to do the same exercise than without a warmup is ridiculous - that much muscle damage would require a medical visit. More research needs to be done."

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