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The Stoic Way To Never Skip Stretching
A 2,000-year-old Stoic fix that turns stretching from an afterthought into an unskippable habit.
Paco Raven
August 12, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
TODAY’S FOCUSRethinking StretchingYou look good. You feel strong in the gym. Back home, you’re stiff, tense, and moving like you’re twice your age. You know the fix — but you keep skipping it. What the Stoics saw as a failure to prepare for the inevitable, I saw in my training — so I stopped treating stretching as an afterthought and started seeing it as necessary preparation. Once I made that shift, I stopped skipping it — and that’s when everything changed… |  |
Welcome to The Stoiclete — a slow newsletter for ambitious men who want to build a capable body & mind that performs. Each edition brings you honest lessons I’ve learned along the way, plus practical frameworks to help you train like an athlete, think like a Stoic, and live a life worth showing up for.
Let’s dive in.
— Paco Raven
REFLECTIONS IN MOTION
Talking stretching through the lens of purpose
Stretches are probably the most often skipped type of exercise by people who work out.
Everyone knows they have to do them. Nobody does them.
By all means, you can skip them. The only side effect? performing at your best will be off the table.
The more you demand from your body. The more you will have to take care of it. You have to prepare to avoid stiffness and muscle tension. This preparation is essential.
The Stoics knew this. If you want to face difficulty with strength, you don’t wait until it arrives. You prepare for it.
It’s a mindset shift. One I borrowed from the Stoics. One, I try to follow every session...
Why should you care about doing stretches?
The Stoics believed the solution to troubles lies before, instead of after. Anticipating what is coming takes away the power of the trouble that is arriving.
Stretching will not completely prevent injuries, but it will prepare your body for them. You will have a lot fewer injuries, and when you do, you will suffer less.
It is the work for the future. You are doing things for which you will not see results for a long time. When the time comes, you will be grateful that you have done them.
The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.
Where doing stretches often goes wrong
Stretching only works when it is done consistently for a long time. You don't see results immediately. It’s boring work. This is why most people skip it often.
They place it at the end of their training. They do it if they have the time. When they do stretch, it’s usually random movements held for a few seconds.
They don’t have a plan for it — like they would for training a muscle group or building endurance. If you don’t plan it, you’ll skip it. And every time you skip it, you’re making a future injury more likely.
This is not new information. People who train know stretching is important, but still fail to do it consistently.
They don’t build a routine around it, so they rely on willpower or the occasional burst of motivation. That approach is doomed to fail.
THIS WEEK’S STOIC INSIGHT
A moment this week that taught me something
Live from Eindhoven, Netherlands
This week, I started taking seriously the idea of building up my Twitter account — to develop my writing, thoughts, and presence. The first step in building an audience is bringing value and engaging with others on the platform. I set out to hit a certain number of replies each day and focus less on original posts for now.
It’s a target I’ll need to hit daily. It’s work I won’t see big results from for a long time. It’s the boring work — but I know what it will allow me to do: make a bigger impact and bring higher-quality newsletters and ideas to you.
A quote from Epictetus sums this up beautifully:
“Progress is not achieved by luck or accident, but by working on yourself daily.”
You can follow my journey here: @paco_raven — I’ll be posting insights, quotes, and sharing my journey to a capable body and mind.
How to stretch the right way
You treat stretching as an afterthought. The secret is to approach stretching the same way you would a muscle group or skill you want to improve.
You select the best exercises and structure them into a routine. Each week, you do the same exercises and adjust when needed.
The best thing about stretching is that this routine doesn’t have to be hours long — not even 10 minutes. Just 5 minutes after each training session is enough to do the work.
Hold each stretch for a specific amount of time. You can adjust the length to make it easier or more difficult — treat it like sets and reps.
It now transitions from vague to specific. And when something is specific, your mind has no excuses to skip it. You know it takes only 5 minutes, and you know exactly what to do. This is how stretching becomes part of your training.
If I could only use one exercise for stretching, it would be this
All stretches have their own use cases. The stretch that helped me the most in my hybrid fitness journey I learned from a physio I worked with. It’s a stretch to loosen up your hips — a very simple exercise where you count the reps. It’s called the dynamic half kneeling hip opener.
This is how you do it:
Kneel on one knee, with your front foot flat and both knees at 90°.
Rotate your hips so the front knee and foot point sideways (90°).
Shift your hips forward to feel a stretch.
Move your hips back and forward slowly for 8–12 reps.
Switch sides and repeat.
END ON PURPOSE
One question to ask yourself today…
Will decisions I make today be based on true judgements?
An important question to ask yourself. Most of the time, we make decisions based on what we think a situation is or will become. The right decisions are made with disregard for how you feel about them. They are made based on judgements that follow the 4 virtues.