Kurz's Stretching Book

I've been reading Thomas Kurz's Stretching Scientifically and I think I like it better than Sang H. Kim's Ultimate Flexibility.

Kurz's book is small, and easy to put together a warm up routine from. Kim's book has hundreds of exercises, and some suggested workouts. Moreover, Kurz has a biology lesson in the beginning where he explains how muscles work, what effect different kinds of stretching have on them and so on. Also, he seems to take a more optimistic view of injury, which is something I find reassuring.

I like that Kurz advises a vigorous warm up with front, side and back kicks before the actual activity. I found this more effective than static stretches. He argues that static stretches are not really preparing you for the dynamic activity. He advises static and isometric stretches only after the activity. This makes sense to me, and I like the feeling of gradually increasing the range of my kicks until class starts. I find that if I do even some static stretching after a kicking warm up, I lose some of my springiness.

I've always felt very stiff and restricted in the groin area. I found that doing many repetitions of quickly raising your leg sideways and touching your hand, in a controlled way, loosens up that area more than the stretch where you sit with soles of feet touching, and try to push your groin apart.