Benefits of a warm up

I was asked yesterday, by one of my clients, what the benefits of warming up were.  As you will see from the list below, warming up is essential if you are going to both protect your body from injury and achieve maximum benefit from your exercise session. So, here are the benefits:-

• Mental preparation - warming up allows you to focus on your training session without putting your body under too much stress, you can get ‘in the zone’ 
• Increased body and muscle temperature - this improves the elasticity of muscle tissue and so helps to prevent straining and pulling muscles
• Increased blood temperature - allowing more oxygen to be produced….again improving performance
• Reduces the stress on your heart because your blood vessels dilate and therefore reduces blood flow resistance
• Improved range of motion - thereby improving your performance and again reducing injury risk
• Hormone changes - this event prepares your body for exercises and helps you utilise your body’s energy stores effectively
• Sweating - this is the body’s way of cooling itself down, by commencing this process during the warm up helps to prevent overheating during the early stages of your exercise routine
• Lactic acid clearance - when adults exercise we get lactic acid (the burning feeling in the muscles when we exercise hard), by warming up properly we begin this clearnce process so again are more effective when training

More on warming up soon.

This entry was posted on 20/08/2009 at 05:47 am and is filed under Latest from Ann. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.