The importance of a warm-up & cool down!

When exercising to moderate / more vigorous intensity levels, it is highly recommended to structure your exercise sessions to include a long warm up (10 – 15 mins) to gradually build up from resting levels to your target exercise intensity, and a long cool down (10 mins) to gradually bring your heart rate back to resting levels.

Lots of adaptations and chemical changes occur in the body when you exercise and to insure these processes don’t occur too quickly and cause any harm to your body, its super important to include these aspects to your exercise sessions.

Starting the exercise slowly, focussing on technique and building up to your target exercise intensity gradually is the best way to do this and while you’re doing this, it can be easy to add in various muscle stretches to work on your range of movement, to help your technique, and reduce the chances of injury when working harder later on in the session.

For those with high-risk of / or long term conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, it is especially recommended to carry out a thorough warm-up and cool-down to drastically reduce the risk of a further medical event.

Immediate cessation (stopping) of moderate / intense exercise leads to excessive stress on the cardiovascular system and evidence suggests that this is the time when cardiovascular events are most likely to occur. The first minute of exercise is also a higher-risk point.

So, whichever activity it is that you’re doing, try to make sure to do an appropriate warm-up and cool-down nice and slow over 10 – 15 minutes and it will help your body out a little bit.

Warm-up & cool-down physiological changes:

🩸Blood vessels dilate (open up) increasing the blood supply to the muscles and heart

🫀Heart rate gradually increases

🌡Body temperature increases

😤Blood releases more oxygen

🦵Joints loosen up

🧠Nervous system engages

🤕Reduces the risk of injury

🏋‍♂️Optimized technique / performance

🤸🏼‍♀️If stretches are included, improves range of motion at the joint

As ever, for free advice on anything health related. Send me a message on here 👍