Warm-ups? Needed or Overkill?

Should I warm-up before activity??

A cheetah never warms up before chasing its next meal………

There’s been a number of times that I have heard this phrase to justify an individual not warming up for activity. 

And to some extent, its correct.

Your need for a warm-up depends on what activity you are about to pursue.  Going for a stroll with friends?  No warm-up required, you’ll naturally improve mobility/blood flow etc required for that activity by just starting out walking. 

Playing high level competitive sport that requires hard changes of direction and a number of accelerations and decelerations?  All of a sudden, the need to prepare your soft tissue structures to cope with those demands has risen.

Hard changes of direction requires a warm-up

There is a large body of evidence that supports using warm-ups for moderate to high-level activity.  And an easy acronym to help you tick off what you want to achieve is RAMP.

The RAMP principle refers to:

Raise- raise your body temp, or in other words, get the blood flowing.  If you have been seated at the desk all day, or asleep in your bed overnight, you need to get your heart rate up and blood flow to muscles etc to allow you to perform.  This may be achieved through an easy short jogging effort, light spin on a bike or a couple of steady warm-up laps in the pool.

Activate- refers to switching on the key muscle groups, and neural pathways required for your chosen activity.  For some sports or athletes, this may be specifically targeted around the lumbopelvic/gluteal area, for others, its shoulder and thoracic focussed.  Specific exercises or “drilling” techniques can turn on these areas in a way that wont fatigue you for your main activity.

An A-March- drilling to activate and mobilise the lumbo-pelvic area

Mobilise- simply refers to trying to get certain areas of the body to improve their range of motion for the sport that’s being played.  Because you have spent time raising your body temp, and activating prior to this mobilisation phase, dynamic stretches as opposed to static stretches, are preferred here.  Examples include leg swings, iron cross stretches, angry cat stretches etc.

Potentiate- the final aspect of a comprehensive warm-up is the potentiation phase.  This refers to performing sport specific movements and/or plyometric activities.  It may be as simple as completing some submaximal lifts for weightlifting, a short series of bounds or strides for athletics, or running through some plays as a team for rugby.  It prepares you neuro-muscularly to perform at the highest level you can.

There are other focus and mental benefits to a warm-up that are hard to quantify for athletes too.  Often a warm-up helps you to concentrate on the activity you are about to perform, a mental rehearsal, that will help avoid mistakes or errors.  It provides a final chance for an individual or team to receive last minute coaching points.  And it is an important routine aspect to be ticked off, to allow an athlete to feel that they have done everything possible to perform at their best. 

If you want help around injury prevention or performance enhancement, book in today to try to work towards your individual goals

Phil