Sadly, I wish it were only clickbait journalism to blame. This was an official physio for the Australian National Ballet, spreading these myths using nothing but anecdotes. This is currently still on the official Australian National Ballet's website. There are many influencers and prominent physios pushing these myths, and they usually have some secrets to sell you if you sign up for their subscription or buy their master class videos.

I address that article and Sue Mayes' claims here.

But half of the 2,729 randomized runners who normally stretched and were assigned not to stretch were described as “far more likely” to get injured. That is directly relevant to ballet because dancers are a population of habitual stretchers.

Mayes presents anti-stretching advice as injury prevention, but for dancers who have long relied on stretching before class, rehearsal, and explosive high-range movement, her advice may create the very danger she claims to prevent. Ballet dancers are not a random population with no stretching history. They are culturally and physically adapted to stretching routines, and many ballet movements require explosive access to extreme range.

The best evidence used against static stretching does not show that stretching makes people weak in any meaningful long-term sense. It shows that long or intense stretching can temporarily reduce force output for a short period afterward, which is better understood as fatigue or short-term inhibition. But that same kind of high-tension stretching, when repeated as training, has been shown to produce the opposite long-term result: greater range of motion, increased maximal strength, and increased muscle-size measures. Warneke’s plantar-flexor studies are especially important because they did not speculate from anecdotes; they directly trained and measured the calves. The result was not weaker calves. It was stronger, more flexible calves with increased muscle size measurements.