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21 February 2022
What is the importance of warm up? Should I do a warm up or can I skip it? We understand the dilemma.
Let’s face it, in our busy lifestyle we make that “extra” time for exercise and the temptation to skip warm up and jump straight into a workout is natural. But exercising without a proper warm up can increase your risk of injury to muscles and tendons.
Warm up exercises helps our body to transition from an inactive to an active state while preparing our muscles, tendons, joints, ligaments and neuromuscular system for a workout.
Yes, you should perform a warmup session before your actual workout session. An adequate warm up should prepare your joints, muscles, tendons and neuromuscular system for your workout by increasing your heart rate, body temperature and blood flow to the working muscles.
Warming up should not be so long that it becomes a workout or a session on its own. In general, the warm up should be between 10 and 15 minutes.
Warm up intensity should be progressive. Start your warm up with a low intensity and gradually increase the intensity to approximately 50–90% of maximum heartrate. In sports such as sprinting, the warm up should end with tasks of maximum intensity upto 90% of the maximum heartrate to induce the PAP effect.
Choose exercises that mimics the main activity or prepare the individual for a specific task of the sport. For example if you are going to perform barbell squat as your main workout, then performing few reps of bodyweight squats could be a ideal warm up activity.
Warm up prior to the start of physical activities is very common and it offers both performance enhancement and injury prevention. The following are the 10 main benefits of performing a warm up prior to physical activity.
Most warm up exercises are performed using your own body weight and does not require sophisticated equipment. Often, having a mat is more than sufficient to perform a simple warm up routine. Try these5 bodyweight warm up exercises which can be performed either at home, outdoors or at a gym.
Check out our compilation of 5 best beginner warm up routine in this video
Warm-up is commonly accepted as fundamental priming practice in sports and exercise world. Warm up has been lauded by health professionals as a means to optimize performance. Many researches have shown that activities when performed without a warm-up can lead to muscle tightness associated with strains to muscles and tendons. Furthermore, performing highly intense or vigorous activity without a warm up can also result in injury which can be detrimental to an individual’s fitness endeavours.
I hope this article explained the importance of warm up. If you are looking for consistent exercise performance and reap the benefits of your exercise program, it’s important to take few minutes to warm up.
Siji is one of the founders of Fitfoody. She has spent over a decade as a medical professional, using her experience and knowledge to create Fitfoody- a health and fitness platform. Siji is a CIMSPA certified fitness coach practicing in the UK and helping clients across the world get fit and healthy. Apart from creating workout plans and coaching her clients, she enjoys travelling and experiencing culture from all over the world.
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