It requires a bit more than this to get yourself “Warmed Up”

I was looking around on the Men’s Fitness site today and stumbled across this article about warming up for your workout. I am always amazed at how many people do not truly understand the value of a proper warm-up. In the Physical Education part of this Blog we started by breaking down all of the components that are required for you to truly warm the body up.

In this article the trainer they used simply says all you need to do to warm-up is to do the same exercise you are going to be doing but just do it at a lesser intensity. So for example if you are going to run, simply spend the first ten minutes running at a slower pace. I wold have to disagree with this recommendation based on several levels. 

First you have to always assume that your muscular system is in a state of various amounts of inefficiency. Our busy lives wreak havoc on our muscular system. We sit all day at school and work which causes a significant amount of tightness and muscular compensation throughout our body. To assume that it will just magically start performing at a high enough level to accomplish the physical task we ask it to is not a good idea. 

I went into significantly more detail in the warm-up section of the Physical Education Section in the blog so I will not take you through all of it again but please read it. You will hopefully gain significantly more respect for the otherwise ignored art of a proper warm-up.

Going back to the running example, there are two major issues with this. First is the fact that whatever tightness and imbalance you may have from a stressful day at work will not just go away as soon as you start running. Remember that our muscular system is an organism that constantly is in a state of change based on what you ask it to do, or not to do. If you sit all day muscles all over your body become dormant and tight thus losing their ability to perform the basics tasks such as posture and movement of the skeletal system. Without addressing this issue first before you start doing any form of running will ultimately lead to an unsuccessful or at least a less successful workout.

Next is the notion that just running slower for ten minutes will get you ready to run at a higher speed also does not work in my opinion. By running at a slower pace for ten minutes you are establishing a set stride pattern in your body. you are giving a repetitive range of motion requirement to your muscles responsible for your current gait pattern. Now following the ten minutes you are going to ask the body to simply change gears without giving it any additional tools to work with. This is where people really start to screw up their strides. What typically happens is that your body has adapted to the stride pattern you set for the previous ten minutes, now when you go to speed up your body tends to compensate and create a faster stride as opposed to you giving the muscles the proper stimulus to be able to generate a faster more efficient stride as a part of an increase in your current state of muscular efficiency.

Follow this link to our post where we give you an example of a good running warm-up that you can do.

I can not encourage you enough to have the patience to perform a good warm-up before any physical activity.