Safety First: How You Should be Warming Up for Winter Sports (And Why it Matters)
No matter the weather or the sport, warming up is an essential part of working out. However, it’s important to warm up properly so you don’t risk seriously injuring yourself during your actual workout. The point of warming up is, as the name suggests, to warm up and loosen your muscles before you get into intense exercise.
Increasing muscle temperature helps prevent injury and improve overall flexibility and mobility during exercise. While many people believe that static stretches and a quick five-minute jog might be a sufficient warm-up, winter exercise is much more demanding of your body.
According to a recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning, your five-minute cardio warm-up is essentially the same as not warming up at all. Even if you’re sprinting to the point where you break a sweat, fast and intense isn’t the way to go when you’re warming up your body.
The study discovered that a high-intensity, 15-minute warm-up actually decreased performance while working out. On the other hand, a low-intensity warm-up of the same length helped improve performance throughout a workout. As the old adage goes, slow and steady wins the race.
Researchers working on the study prescribed a total of four different warm-ups to groups of test subjects and assigned a fifth group no warm-up at all. Overall, the only two warm-ups that showed any results were those longer than 10 minutes. When combined with low-intensity, this warm-up allows the body to reach a higher temperature without any excessive fatigue.
The most important aspect of warming up is to take your time. Even after you’ve warmed up properly, give your body time to adjust to the intensity of your workout to avoid injury. The human body has anywhere from two to four million sweat glands working as a cooling system, so you don’t have to worry about overheating as you increase the intensity of your exercise.
- This entry was posted in Contributed by Contributor. Bookmark the permalink.
