In this web site post we will discuss the advantages proper warm-ups pose on subsequent performance. Specifically, we will discuss about the improved performance carrying out a warm-up.
Warm up for Improved Performance
Far too often individuals?view a warm-up as simply stretching, warming muscles, and “loosening up”. Although a warm-up is indeed those activities, it is also priming energy systems and metabolic pathways for the metabolic stress (physical activity) in the future. If you are one of those people who skip warm-ups (you know what you are!) then you’re performing at sub-optimal levels and?should be ashamed.
Most individuals reading this have probably heard of the various metabolic pathways the body can utilize to create?energy by means of ATP to?perform movement and physical activity. I will simplify these pathways for the moment in an effort to bare this post short and concise.
There is a?purely anaerobic pathway, the phosphocreatine system (ATP-pc) which is accountable for providing energy in very short duration activities (think 10 sec.). Then glycolysis takes over and can convert glucose/glycogen into ATP for energy. Both of these systems have a finite amount of energy and once it’s gone it’s gone. However, you will find oxidative pathways that may provide sustained ATP production, utilizing oxygen, for too long amounts of time (hours to days). Which was a very?quick explanation, but all that you should know is your anaerobic pathways?have a finite work load they are able to perform, once they are depleted fatigue kicks in and you crumble to the floor wiggling around because it feels like your legs are going to burst into flames. However, at lower intensities, we are able to make use of the oxidative pathways to provide energy basically forever and become on our merry way.
As previously mentioned, a hot up will essentially?prime the aerobic energy system so that carrying out a warm-up the oxidative energy system can more quickly and readily meet exercise demands. In an article titled “Oxygen Uptake Kinetics as a Determinant of Sports Performance” by Burnley and Jones, they dive head first in to the deep end of O2 kinetics. Within their discussion, they discuss the mechanisms behind the increase in performance following a warm-up.
Burnley and Jones point out that the rise in performance is due to a more rapid rise in VO2 in reaction to exercise. This seems counter-intuitive initially, what you know already that the increased increase in VO2 would cause a decrease in performance right? Wrong, so listen up.
When participating in exercise we want oxygen to do work. In the onset of exercise/physical activity, there is an initial increase in VO2 to meet the requirements from the activity, we’ll use running like a simple example. You start jogging at a slow pace and VO2 rises to meet energy demands; once the demands are met VO2 plateaus and also you reach what is called a stable state. In a steady state, VO2 remains constant; this really is, theoretically, an intensity you could maintain forever.
The graph below depicts a steady state. You can clearly see a preliminary increase in VO2 and then a clear plateau that stays relatively constant.
Now, at higher exercise intensities, we will see what is known a VO2 slow component. You’re running at a pretty brisk pace that you won’t have the ability to maintain for an extremely very long time. When we reach a steady state our oxidative (slow twitch) muscle fibers are able to meet the demands of activity; when we see a slow component our fast twitch fibers need to be recruited to help meet exercise demands. The short twitch fibers are not efficient however and result in a steady but very slow increase in VO2. You are able to clearly check this out within the graph below. Please ignore the hieroglyphics and just concentrate on the steady but very slow increase in VO2 following the initial rapid increase.
So how come all this matter? Because when we mentioned earlier you need to perform anaerobic work until your oxidative systems can kick into gear this really is simply the time during that initial rise in VO2. When you are performing anaerobic work you’re burning fuel sources (remember it’s a finite quantity of energy) like glycogen and phosphocreatine. Therefore if my rise in VO2 before reaching steady state or perhaps a slow component is super slow i quickly have to perform much more anaerobic work and burn through more of my limited fuel supplies. If I possess a steep and rapid initial response in VO2 i quickly don’t have to use up as a lot of my goods to achieve a stable state or slow component.
In the graph here we can easily see bout 1 (warm up) in black dots and bout 2 in white dots. You are able to clearly observe that the second bout (white dots) includes a faster increase in VO2 and reaches that slow component just a little quicker than in bout 1. Although these two athletes achieve the same peak VO2 white dots guy/gal gets there quicker and it has less of an oxygen debt to pay. Therefore if they were two athletes competing alongside then your white dots guy or gal?will probably possess a greater “kick” at the end of the event because he/she consumed less glycogen/phosphocreatine at the beginning of the big event. Pretty cool stuff!
Hopefully you’re still the follow here. So carrying out a warm-up Burnley and Jones found that there is a quicker and more rapid increase in VO2 thus burning a smaller amount of your limited fuel sources. So how exactly does this improve performance? Well, the more fuel it will save you initially the greater you have after a workout/race/event so that you can provide just a little kick in the pants and shift gears to complete faster/stronger.
Through mechanisms currently unknown Burnley and Jones also noted that following a warm-up individuals were able to attain a higher peak VO2. Meaning they were capable of singing more work on exactly the same intensity following a warm-up.
The one caveat to some warm-up is that it?shouldn’t be intense exercise if your goal is long duration sustained performance. The primary point of this article is that you can save limited fuel sources having a quicker rise in VO2, but if you are exercising at higher intensities then you’re going to burn that fuel regardless. So a light to moderate warm-up underneath the heavy domain of exercise is recommended by Burnley and Jones.
That would be a lot of information! Hopefully all of you got something from looking over this article and can implement warm-ups having a better knowledge of why, physiologically, warm-ups improve long-duration performance.