The warm-up is an important phase of any workout but is often overlooked. It is the first phase of every session. How much time do you usually spend on your warm-up? Do you use a standard protocol or are you good enough to differentiate it according to the type of session you have to do?
Let’s try to understand a little more about it
A warm-up is defined as all the activities you do before a workload. They serve, on the one hand, to create the ideal situation psychophysically to cope with exertion and, on the other hand, are important for injury prevention. Making efforts, especially high intensity efforts, without proper warming up could also cause serious injury.
In general in sports you can distinguish between general and special warm-ups. The general warm-up which is in any case the first phase prevents the activation of large muscle groups while the special warm-up is related to the specific movements of each sports discipline. For running, a general warm-up practiced through fifteen to twenty minutes of slow running is usually more than enough to stimulate the ideal conditions to begin your workout. The higher the intensity in terms of strength or speed the better the quality of your warm-up should be. Before a long/slow workout or progressive you won’t need to incorporate the first few minutes of very easy running.
Job-specific heating
On the other hand, when you have to tackle specific work such as flat or uphill repeats, it will be much better to include progressive stretches in your warm-up to recruit and use more muscle fibers.
At the same time, these changes will also stimulate your cardiovascular system and prepare it for the next effort. Before strength work even short stretching and joint mobility exercises such as technique drills can be important to complete the warm-up phase well. It is really the general warm-up phase that goes to increase your ability to sustain even a high load with your joints.
In principle, therefore, the warm-up should be longer and more careful before short, fast workouts and shorter and easier before longer workouts to be done at low or moderate intensity.
It’s a matter of temperature
The first effect of general warm-up is toraise your body temperature, which is a prerequisite for stimulating your performance ability. As the temperature rises, in fact, your metabolism also rises. In muscle tissues into which more and more blood gradually begins to flow, capillaries dilate to facilitate the passage of oxygen and energy substrates. Just think that during a slow run your metabolism can increase up to twenty times your basal metabolism. In a high-intensity sprint up to 200 times. Between twenty and two hundred you then find all the increases in metabolism you go through sustaining the paces you usually perform in your sessions and/or in competition.
Increasing body temperature is precisely the main goal of warming up because beyond the direct benefit of warming up the muscles involved in the movement you have significant benefits from both a reaction time and coordination standpoint. Indeed, it has been repeatedly shown of how higher temperature promotes the acceleration of the nervous system. In practical terms this translates into greater speed of reaction and especially muscle contraction. The involvement of the nervous system is very important because performance also improves from a coordination point of view. Thus, in all disciplines where the technical aspect is crucial, a good warm-up promotes a good result from the very beginning, both in terms of technique and intensity.
Heart and mind
For a runner like you, it is important to emphasize the aspects of warming up related to the cardiovascular system, which plays a key role in all endurance disciplines. During the first few minutes of activity, it is therefore important that the heart rate gradually ament in order to ensure greater blood flow throughout the cardiovascular system. This adaptation is necessary because it ensures greater oxygen transport to muscle tissue-a necessary condition for sustaining your running performance. If, on the contrary, you do not do a proper warm-up, you risk suffering the early stages of training. Not only will the perceived exertion be greater, but you may experience annoying phenomena such as hip twinges that will not allow you to run well for the first few miles.
Mental aspects also benefit from the effects of a good warm-up. If you warm up properly before a competition even on a mental level you will be ready to face the effort properly.
To each his own warming
In addition to the general principles you have seen there are then aspects of warming up that are related to your own characteristics or to particular situations you face.
For example, the duration of warm-up is a function of age. In fact, as the years go by you will need a longer and more progressive warm up to carry out your training. If you are no longer very young, run at least 15 to 20 minutes in progression before your core work. So you will also reduce the risk of injury. While for children, very often, 5 minutes is more than enough time to raise the body temperature adequately.
Similarly, the more trained you are, the less time you need to “carb up.” Instead, for novices or untrained athletes, a longer warm-up at a very low intensity is recommended.
Other aspects to consider are the outside temperature and the time of day. When you run in the cold, winter months you need a few extra minutes to make sure you have reached the correct body temperature. The colder it is, the greater the risk of injury related to increased muscle stiffness will also be. Cold weather requires more adaptation for breathing and circulation to adapt to very cold air temperature.
If you work out early in the morning after a night of rest and inactivity you will need to extend your warm-up than if you work out in the afternoon or evening after a day of full physical and mental activity.
As you can see, there are many aspects to take into account, but if you warm up at low intensity for at least 15 minutes, you are sure to be better prepared for the next effort. Then, depending on the specific content of each workout, you will have to find the right mix of cardiac and muscle activation to always achieve the goal.
(Main image credits: AlessandroBiascioli on DepositPhotos.com)