You're probably one of those people who, as soon as they arrive at the gym and drop off their bag... training At the ticket booth, you go to the weight room and start your exercise routine and repetitions without even thinking about the heating Before, what for, right?
It turns out there are benefits to warming up before starting the actual training, as this activity helps us to:
– Reduced risk of injury and increased muscle performance during the most intense part of training.
– Warming up raises the body temperature, substantially improving blood circulation. As a result, the muscles, tendons, and nervous system are in better condition to begin working.
Warming up is the most important part of preventing future injuries.
Once we have seen the benefits of warming up for our body, we must distinguish the two parts that we must take into account within it.
The first part of our warm-up should be some kind of very generic exercise that activates most of our body, such as running in the:
- static tape
- stationary bike
- the elliptical; this exercise being of moderate intensity (although not excessive) and for about 10 or 15 minutes.
The second part of the warm-up would focus on certain specific muscle groups that we should always warm up if we are going to exercise them during the actual training.
For example, if our workout routine is going to focus on legs, we should warm up on the elliptical. Similarly, we'll warm up on the rowing machine if our workout is going to focus on the core.
A 15-minute warm-up that activates most of our body is the right one.
Another big question we always ask ourselves when we're warming up is whether or not we should stretch our muscles before intense training; after many studies on this topic, a consensus has been reached.
And this consensus would be to do active stretching, that is, stretching that involves movement in the body and not static stretching, since too much tension is generated in the muscles and tendons if the body is not in motion when we perform the stretches.
Having seen the warm-up to do before the training session, we will also see what we should do once we have finished the training to be able to return to a calm state and that our body does not suffer more than necessary.
And on this topic there are hardly any tricks or new things that we are going to explain to you, the steps to follow will be the return to calm by performing a very very gentle exercise such as the stationary bike (or spinning bike), treadmill or the elliptical, so that our heart rate and body temperature go down and return to normal.
Finally, and perhaps the most important part of our training, is to thoroughly stretch the area we worked most intensely during the session. This improves the flexibility of the area, relaxes the muscles, and maximizes muscle recovery so that we can train that muscle group again at maximum intensity with only a few days of rest.
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