Floris Gierman shows how to warm up and cool down for running. Start with a 5-minute walk and 10-15 minute jog to shift blood to muscles and raise oxygen delivery. End with a 10-minute slow jog and walk to clear lactate and speed recovery.
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Hey there, Floris Gierman here from Extramileist, and today we're going to be talking about the warm-up and the cool-down. In particular, what happens in the body during a warm-up and a cool-down, what are the benefits of the warm-up and cool-down, and we're going to go outside and actually look in real life what the right warm-up and cool-down looks like. When your body is in a regular resting state, the majority of your blood is actually moving around your main organs your glands, and the different systems like your nervous system in your body. There's a relatively little amount of blood moving throughout your muscles. A warm-up prepares your body for a workout, and so the reason you want to do a slow, gradual warm-up is so that the blood has a chance to move from the organs into the muscles, and it actually has a while to do that instead of rushing into it. Depending on the workout intensity, 50% or even up to 80% of your blood supply that's going around to the rest of your body is going to be moving into your muscles. A warm-up increases the blood flow to the active muscles and it warms up the temperature of the body, especially of the muscles. Slowly increasing your heart rate will help this process. If your workout starts too fast, your body will send a message to the legs that it needs blood right away. So what's going to happen is the muscles in your core are going to contract. Your heart rate shoots up and your blood vessels are gonna open and close just to make sure that the blood can get to your legs right away. This shock reaction to the body will actually interrupt the regular warm-up process and it will wear the body down a lot more. When your organs and glands quickly have less blood available, this can also result in abnormal heart function and a very irregular blood pressure. There's also evidence that your body is more resistant to tearing after a warm-up, so there's a lot less chance of injuries. A proper warm-up of at least 15 minutes is important to make sure that both your body and your mind are ready for an optimal workout. Several things will happen during a proper warm-up. First of all, there's going to be more blood flow in the working muscles. There's going to be more oxygen available. You have more lung capacity, and there's going to be more efficiency in your muscles, your joints, your tendons, and your ligaments. And there's going to be more stored body fat that's going to start being utilized as an energy source. One way to warm up is to start with a 5-minute walk. Yes, a 5-minute walk will already start several processes in your body. After your 5-minute walk, you're going to start a slow, gradual jog for the next 10-15 minutes, making sure you keep a conversational pace. Let's go outside and dive into how this would actually look in real life.
I'm gonna start off with a 5-minute mindful walk, and we're gonna pay good attention to our posture and our movement. Gonna be able to start pushing off with your big toe, move your arms and upper body, and pay good attention to what's happening in your surrounding, whether that is the the cars that you hear in the background, the leaf blowers, the birds, any of those kind of things. I often pay good attention to my breath because this can help reduce your stress levels significantly. So I would take a deep breath in, hold it for a little bit, and take a deep breath out again. When you're starting out with your walk, your heart rate is probably going to be anywhere between 50, 60, 70, 80. Often when you put on your shoes and walk down the stairs or get out of the door, your heart rate might go up a bit from your resting heart rate. But that's the starting point, and from there we're going to start gradually getting it up. During my warm-up, I focus on my heart rate. I don't really look at pace, but when I just check my pace, I'm doing about 12-minute miles, slowly increasing that. Just watch out because your heart rate might shoot up rather quickly if you're not paying attention to it. Now, after my 5-minute walk and 10-minute jog, I've reached my max aerobic heart rate of 144. I'm going to be running at this heart rate for about 40 minutes, then going to start my cooldown. I think there's a lot of Pokémon people going on. Do people still play that? Is this all Pokémon?
Oh yeah.
Wow. Pokémon is still alive. I just finished my main 40-minute workout. We can talk a little bit more about the details of the cooldown.
Cool-downs are also an important part of any workout. After a workout, your blood contains relatively large quantities of CO2, carbon dioxide, and other byproducts of exercise. You want some of the blood that is in your muscles to get back to focus on normal circulation in both the organs and the glands. The cool-down helps get more oxygen to your muscles, and it also helps remove some of the blood lactate buildup. This is very important not only for the high heart rate exercise and for the long runs, but actually for the regular aerobic workouts as well. If you don't cool down and your heart rate drops really quickly, the bad blood with the lactate buildup will stay in your body longer, and it will take much longer to recover, and you will get less benefits from your workout. This is exactly the reason why you don't want to finish a run with a sprint and then just stop. For a cooldown, you can do the exact opposite of what we did in the warm-up earlier. Let's take a look outside.
When you know you have about 15 minutes left, you're going to start slowing down your pace. My current heart rate is 144, and I want to start bringing that down over the next 10 minutes before I start walking. After about 10 minutes, my pace has slowed down significantly. My heart rate has come down quite a bit as well. Some athletes might actually have to start walking quite a bit earlier to help get that heart rate down if they can't get it down at a, at a jogging pace. After a 10-minute slow jog, I start walking, and this will help get the heart rate even more down. Listen to your body and pay attention to your breathing. And there you have it, the 15-minute cooldown to finish your workout.
To summarize this video, a proper warm-up helps make a workout less stressful on your body, while a cooldown helps with recovery to start effectively and in a timely manner.
As you can see on the Strava screenshot, the first 5 minutes the heart rate is going up during the walk.
Then as soon as I go from the walk to the slow jog, it gradually continues going up. Then after 15 minutes I'm at that 144 heart rate that I'm aiming at, staying on there for about 40 minutes. During the cooldown it's actually coming down again, and then you actually see it spiking up once. That is when I had to dodge the Pokemon Go players that were hanging out on the sidewalk. But gradually it was coming down all the way once I stopped walking and it came down just below 100 beats per minute again. Although you might feel that this takes a lot of time, there are significant health benefits to a proper warm-up and cool-down. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions at all, just let me know in the comments and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can. Many more running videos and articles can be found on my website www.extramilest.com. I hope you have fun out there on your runs.
