Importance of Warm Ups
The Importance to Warm Ups
The main purpose to warming up before exercise is injury prevention. Warm ups are meant to gradually raise the temperature of the body by increasing blood flow to the muscle, loosen the joints, and safely increase your heart rate. During exercise muscles will contract and lengthen, muscles won’t work effectively if it is immediately introduced to strenuous exercise. This can lead to muscle pulls and tears.
How to Warm Up Appropriately
If you’re a novice, a general calisthenic warm up will keep you safe for most physical exercises. Depending on your sport or training style there are different types of warm ups that will help you reap maximum benefits. Here are examples of specific warm up styles with explanations.
Aerobic activities involve raising your heart rate to a level that leaves you out of breath during your preformed exercise. Examples such as running, swimming, high intensity interval training (HIIT), plyometric training and more.
Focus on gradually warming up:
- Heart rate
- Calves if jumping or sprinting
- Major muscle groups
Strength training such as bodybuilding, powerlifting, and olympic lifting will raise your heart rate but not nearly as much as aerobic exercise. Strength training focuses on maximum strength output for each session. Your warm up will be different than an aerobic warm up in the sense that you don’t want to exert too much energy but just enough to prep your muscles for heavy lifts. These warm ups will typically target the muscle groups for a specific lift of the day.
Focus on gradually warming up:
- The lift of the day- If you’re performing heavy deadlifts, incorporate very light deadlifts into your warm up
- Core and stability along the spine- regardless of your lift you will use your abs to brace the spine
- The joints
Dynamic stretches are recommended and usually integrated into any warm up. These are primarily used as a way to gradually warm up the full range of each muscle of the body. As a general rule of thumb dynamic stretches are usually performed for 10 seconds or less, where as static stretches are held for more than thirty seconds. Research shows that holding stretches for more than thirty seconds during warm ups begin to decrease the amount of power output for that muscle group. Please note that dynamic stretches are controlled full range movements and NOT bouncing in a stretch. Bouncing in a stretch is not safe and is best avoided, this is known as ballistic stretching. If you’re interested in reading more on stretching and flexibility click here.