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Walk into the gym, and it’s tempting to breeze past your warm-up and jump straight into your workout. I mean, who of us hasn’t walked into a cycling class 5 minutes late and immediately started pedaling our hearts out? And when you’re strapped for time, why would you want to spend five or 10 minutes working your body at any less than 100 percent?
Because, if you don’t, you won’t be able to give your actual workout anywhere near 100 percent.
By literally warming up your muscles, you’re priming them to do their job more efficiently.
“Warming up turns your muscles on as if they were a light switch, putting you in the best position to have optimal performance during your workout,” Michael Silverman, P.T., director of rehabilitation and wellness at Northern Westchester Hospital in New York, tells SELF. Much of that lights-on effect comes down to literally warming your muscles.
At rest, the muscles receive relatively little blood flow and therefore are actually significantly cooler that the rest of the body, Andrew R. Coggan, Ph.D., associate professor of kinesiology and integrative physiology at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, tells SELF. The blood supplies the oxygen and other compounds your muscles need to work optimally. So, if you ask a blood-deprived (aka cold) muscle to power a long run or heavy squat, it’s not going to go well.
By performing a low-intensity warm-up, however, your body reroutes blood to the working muscles slowly. Through that process, the heart starts pumping more blood with every beat and individual muscle cells are primed to take in and use the oxygen that’s floating through your bloodstream, Coggan explains.
They also become flooded with enzymes that allow their contractile units (that is, the part of the muscle cell that makes it contract and relax) to work faster, stronger, and longer, he says. These enzymes, responsible for breaking down fuel sources, releasing energy, and removing metabolic byproducts from the body, become more efficient at higher temperatures. For instance, one Sports Medicine research review of warm-ups concluded that they allow exercisers to start their workouts with elevated VO2 levels—the amount of oxygen the body takes in and uses per minute—resulting in improved high-intensity, short-duration, and even endurance performances.
A warm-up also loads up your muscle cells with the chemicals they need to perform hard physical activity.
In addition, all temperature-raising aside, every move you make both requires and causes the release of calcium ions into your muscle cells. And the more forceful and powerful the motion, the more calcium ions your muscle cells need. Warm-ups more or less pre-load the cells with the calcium they need to contract more forcefully during your actual workout, he says.
Hence why one Journal of Sports Science and Medicine research study found that by performing a low- to moderate-intensity lower-body warm-up, exercisers were able to recruit and activate 5.9 to 8.5 percent more of their quads’ muscle fibers. The more muscle fibers you work, the greater your performance (there’s more muscle power performing the action).
All performance benefits aside, experts also recommend warming up to lower your risk of getting sidelined with an injury.
One BMC Medicine review of nine prior studies concluded that warm-up routines significantly decrease the risk of lower-body injuries in female athletes. Warming up was found to be particularly effective at preventing ACL tears, which are highly prevalent in runners, and especially female runners.
After all, when your muscles are cold, your tendons, ligaments, and cartilage, which contain minimal blood vessels, are just as cold—if not colder. And you know what they say about cold rubber bands (ahem, they snap). Meanwhile, as blood flow and heat increases through your muscles and connective tissues, they become more elastic, Coggan notes.
When your muscles are more elastic and agile, they can execute movements better with a lower chance of being pulled tight and strained. “For example, when running, warming up with some A-skips will help your hamstrings properly slow down your leg during the swing phase of gait as you prepare to land,” Silverman says.
The best warm-up depends on the workout you’re about to do.
How to best prepare your body for exercise depends largely on what your actual workout entails, Silverman says.
“Warming up your shoulders, for example, isn’t nearly as important for running as is warming up your hamstrings,” he notes. “But a shoulder warm-up may be more important for someone doing an upper-arm-focused strength workout. Making your warm-up as sports-specific as possible puts you in a better place to succeed.”
When it comes to making your warm-up as relevant to your workout as possible, it pays to consider more than the muscles involved. You also need to think about the intensity of your workout. The best warm-up starts out at a low intensity and gradually increases to meet that of your actual workout, Coggan says.
If you’re lifting weights, for example, you could begin your warm-up with some bodyweight exercises and, depending on your strength, gradually increase the weight. Research consistently shows that lifting light loads (25 to 65 percent of your one-rep max, or weights you could easily lift for 15 to 30 reps) is beneficial for increasing lifting performances. In one Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research research study performed on 22 Australian athletes, performing one set of 10 reps of seven low-intensity moves such as a glute bridge, clamshell, and stability ball wall squats with such loads significantly improved participants’ squat performance.
However, when warming up, it’s important to make sure that you don’t push it so hard that your warm-up takes away from your full-fledged workout, Coggan says, recommending that most people cap their warm-ups at about 5 to 10 minutes. “If your warm-up is so strenuous that you have to recover before you train, then you’re warming up too hard.”
People performing lower-intensity workouts such as steady-state running or cycling can stick closer to 5 minutes, as can those exercising outdoors in hot or humid weather, as it’s easy to overtax the body in both situations, he says. “Pay attention to how your body feels, and when you start to get that prickly feeling in your armpits with the release of adrenaline and first beads of sweat, you’re ready to go.”
Written for Self Magazine