WARMING UP IS IT WORTH IT?

Most of us warm up more out of habit than scientific conviction. Here to add some rigour to our pre-race routines, Dr Mark Burnley has a PhD in precisely which warm-ups work best..

- Dr Mark Burnley

Warm-up is one of those unquestioned things that virtually everyone does before training and competing. Think back to your earliest PE lesson at school. Chances are, you did some stretching, waved your arms and legs around and went for a short jog “to get your heart and muscles going”. That has translated into cycling all the way up to Grand Tours, with dedicated time and facilities for warming up. But does it work? And if so, how does it work, and how do we get maximum benefit from it?

Doing any kind of exercise will warm you up because the human body is not very effiient at harnessing the energy it releases from food. About 75 per cent of it is immediately lost as heat, warming up the tissues and blood nearby. The body tries to get rid of this heat by transferring it to the skin, and the entire body warms up. Physiology textbooks will tell you that warming up the muscle also increases blood flow to muscles, reduces muscle stiffness, increases the speed of nerve conduction, and prepares the heart for future exertion. Although there is an element of truth in all of these ideas, we’ve recently discovered that a warm-up may be better described as an “acid-up”.

One of the key questions you need to answer when designing a warm-up is, “what are you warming up for?” A track sprinter needs to take a very different approach to a time triallist, who will, in turn, warm-up differently to a Grand Tour rider at the start of a big mountain stage. To be effective, you need to match your warm-up to the determinants of the event.