Every workout, regardless of your time constraints, needs to be preceded by a warm-up session. If you don’t have time to warm up, than you don’t have time to work out.
Warm-up prepares the body for what it is about to come – more intensive activity.
Warm-up is an activity that raises the total body temperature, as well as the temperature of the muscles, to prepare the body for vigorous exercise. It is part of the foundation of successful exercise session. Getting fully warmed up, mentally and physically, is a key aspect of attaining a training intensity required to achieve great results.
Warm-up protects against injury by improving flexibility of the muscles.
Here are some of the benefits you achieve with warm up:
- An increase in muscle blood flow
- An increase in the sensitivity of nerve receptors
- Faster moving oxygen from hemoglobin
- An increase in the speed of nerve impulse transmissions
Warm up guidelines:
In general the warm-up activity should last approximately 5 – 15 minutes, long enough for you to break out in a sweat.
It needs to be done with gradual increase of intensity – from 40% to 60% of maximal intensity.
You should choose activity mechanically similar to the primary conditioning activity and intensity should be well below that of the primary activity.
Examples of warm up activities:
- Stationary cycling – start with cycling against little or no resistance and gradually increase it
- Sprinting – jogging and graduated pace in running intervals
- Elliptical – Start with little resistance and gradually increase it
- Lap swimming – begin with slow crawl and gradually increase arm stroke, do some more intensive short intervals 1 – 2 laps
- Stationary exercise devices like rowing machine, stair masters, treadmills – begin with 40 – 60% of intended conditioning workload or speed and slowly increase
- Weight training – gradually warm up with all body activities like rowing machines or elliptical; treadmill is fine, but take some light dumbbells and move your hands too