This Week's Article:
Get the Most from your Warm-Up Time!
Warming up before you exercise helps to prevent injuries
and lets you jump higher, run faster, lift heavier or throw further.
A study from Belgium shows that competitive athletes in sports
requiring speed and endurance perform better after they warm
up intensely before competition (Medicine and Science in Sports
and Exercise, December 2003)
Warming up can prevent injuries because muscles are
made up of millions of individual fibers, just like a rope made
from many threads. When you start to exercise at a very slow
pace, you increase the blood flow to muscle fibers, increase their
temperature, and bring in more oxygen, so the muscles are more
pliable and resistant to injury. When you contract a muscle for
the first time, you use less than one percent of your muscle
fibers. The second time you bring in more fibers, and you keep
on increasing the number of muscle fibers used in each
contraction for several minutes of using that muscle. It's called
recruitment.
When you are able to contract more muscle fibers, there is less force on each individual fiber to help protect them from injury. Usually you are warmed up when you start to sweat. However, warming up slowly does not increase the maximum amount of oxygen that you can bring to muscles that you need during competition. This study shows that warming up intensely increases endurance because intensity increases the maximum amount of oxygen that you can bring to your muscles, as you continue to compete, and lets your muscles contract with greater force as you begin to fatigue.
If you are a competitive runner, skier, cycler, or an athlete in any sport that requires endurance, warm up at a gradually increasing pace. Then use a series of increasingly intense repetitions of 10 to 30 seconds duration, with short recoveries, until you are near your maximum pace. You will then be able to bring in more oxygen to your muscles than you could have done without the intense warmup .
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