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A recent study showed that resting with your hands on your knees after exercise helps you recover faster than standing with your hands on your head.
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The prone position of the torso during rest improves breathing and promotes a faster return to normal heart rate, optimizing athletic performance.
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Old advice from physical education teachers about resting with hands on knees has proven scientifically sound, demonstrating the importance of proper recovery.
I remembered youwhen in school (yes, amarcord moment!) our physical education teachers (which in my neck of the woods and in my day we all simply called gym class) would make us do warm-ups by running around the perimeter of the arena with final strides and at the end they would tell us to position ourselves with our legs slightly apart and bent and to place our hands on top of our knees to breathe better? There, how many times have we thought it was a useless thing and just a waste of time delaying the start of the volleyball or basketball or soccer game? Well, this time-wasting thing must have occurred to a lot of people, and some of these alumni-turned-researchers well thought to go and check whether or not it was a moot point. To figure this out, 24 female soccer players were selected, for whom all major biometric measures were recorded as well as those related to heart rate, respiratory rate and lung capacity. The test consisted of resting after a specific training effort by holding hands on bent knees or resting them on the head while standing. The exercise, a four-minute run followed by three rests to be done four times, was performed from the resting heart rate, the maximum heart rate at the end of the run was recorded, and the time to return to the resting rate performed in either mode.
THE GOOD PROFESSORS OF YESTERYEAR!
The result was quite clear and showed that athletes who rested upright and with their hands on their heads took longer to return to resting conditions than those who performed resting with their hands resting on their knees. To better understand how this rest mode acts, the researchers then went to check the recorded biometric parameters. Among the many, the one that shared the most favorable return-to-normality values were those related to torso tilt. A torso tilted forward by values greater than 10% significantly promoted a return to normal values. The position of the arms, then, allowed for some dilation of the rib cage, enough to cause breathing to improve significantly, and it is clear that the ability to recover faster is a crucial part of optimizing performance not only of runners, but for athletes in virtually all sports. Understanding how to make rest, then, is essential to boosting one’s performance and, at least in this case, making peace with our old teachers, who, once again, they were right! (Main image credits: ngampol.photo7380 on DepositPhotos.com – Inspired by “Effects of Two Different Recovery Postures during High-Intensity Interval Training,” by Michaelson et al., 2019, Translational Journal)