Woodbridge Physiotherapy Practice
And Sports Injury Clinic
Contact Details
Tel: 01394 387916
Email: info@woodbridgephysio.co.uk
Woodbridge Physiotherapy Practice Ltd
Prentices Lane
Woodbridge
Suffolk
IP12 4LF
In terms of injury, the preparation you do before starting a workout/training session can be more important than the contents of the training session itself.
Jumping straight into exercise is both ineffective and dangerous.
Just as a car needs to be ‘warmed up’ before it will run smoothly, it takes time for the body to ‘get going’ and change from normal resting levels to a point at which it is ready to face the rigours of intense exercise.
Because the body tissues are stiffer and less pliable when cold, muscles are more easily pulled and joints can be damaged.
In addition, if heartbeat is speeded up with a jolt instead of increasing gradually it can become irregular rather than showing its normal smooth rhythm. These changes affecting the heart can be potentially very serious, especially in the older or less active individual.
The function of warm up is, therefore, to prepare the body for action and, in doing so, both reduce the likelihood of injury and to make the subsequent exercise routine more effective.
Warm up can be either ‘passive’ – during which the body is heated from the outside or ‘active’, where exercise is used to form the heat internally. An example of passive warm up is to have a sauna or hot shower while an active warm up can be achieved through gentle jogging. Both types can be effective but are appropriate to different situations.
An active warm up is the type normally used before exercise while passive warm up is useful when working with an injury. Eg before stretching a muscle tightened from a previous strain.
From the point of view of injury and rehab the obvious advantage of the passive warm up is that it does not require the athlete to move the injured tissues in order to create body heat.
Another often neglected, advantage of passive warm up is that it does not significantly use up any of the body’s energy supplies. This can be important before competition when a passive warm up is used to maintain body heat after an active warm up has been performed.
A good warm up will have a number of effects. Firstly, it will make the actions which follow it smoother through practice. This is the reasoning behind taking a practice swing before hitting a golf ball for example and is useful before any activity which requires skill.
The Second function of warm up is to increase the heart rate and raise the BP steadily and safely, rather than causing them to jump dangerously from resting to training levels.
Finally, the warmth produced in the body will increase the flow of blood through the tissues and allow them to stretch more easily.
A general warm-up affects the whole body and should always be followed by a ‘specific’ warm-up that concentrates on the parts of the body which will be used in a particular exercise.
The amount of activity required in a warm up will depend on a person’s fitness level and on the intensity of the exercise or sport to be undertaken. This is because different people raise their body temperature at different rates depending on body size, amount of body fat and rate of energy metabolism.
Different sports make very different demands of the body. For this reason the warm up before a vigorous game of squash will need to be more intensive than that which would proceed a casual round of golf. Equally a top level swimmer will require a more thorough warm up session than a casual swimmer because they would be likely to need to push to a higher level of physical activity.
To be effective, a warm up should be intense enough to cause mild sweating. When this happens the inside (core) temperature of the body has increased by about 1°c. In the pool environment it could be achieved by jogging on the spot in a tracksuit or cycling on a static bike in the gym ( or even cycling to the pool). The joints should be taken through their full range of motion, starting with small movements which gradually become larger and more dynamic.
Warm Down
Just as it is vital to begin an exercise session slowly, so it is important to end it the same way. When you exercise hard your heartbeat is increased and the process is actually helped by the contraction of the exercising muscles. This system known as the ‘auxiliary muscle pump’ is important to the functioning of the cardiovascular system.
If you stop exercising suddenly, the muscles no longer contract and pump blood along the vessels which travel through them. The demand placed on the heart is greater and the pulse actually increases even though you have stopped exercising! A good example of this is provided by the use of electric treadmills in the gym. When inexperienced users run on these they sometimes get carried away and get faster and faster until they start to become exhausted. Instead of slowing down, they jump off the treadmill in a panic, momentarily increasing the demand on the heart – sometimes with tragic consequences!
Another important feature of warm down period is that it can help to decrease muscle ache. Acids formed while you exercise will cause muscle pain and swelling within the muscle and can give ‘delayed onset muscle soreness’ – you feel fine the day after a work out but during the next day you feel stiff. To reduce these effects, a warm down (or cool down) period should be performed using similar exercises to those chosen for the warm up. Start the warm down at the intensity of your work out and gradually slow down until your pulse is back to its normal resting level.
The Importance of Warm Up Before Exercise