A Good Warm-up can Prevent Injuries

Learn about all the benefits that dedicating a few minutes to warming-up can have for you. Don’t let the risk of suffering an injury increase by not having your body well prepared for exercise.

Did you know that a warm-up can prevent injuries? During exercise, your body uses many muscles and makes joint extensions and movements that could lead to an injury. Now, the risk of suffering an injury noticeably decreases after a good warm-up. Take note!

Many people skip the warm-up, which is more serious than it seems. Contracting your muscles while they are still cold can cause damage that’s detrimental to your sports performance.

How a warm-up can prevent injuries

A warm-up is a set of exercises that are done before training, in order to improve the performance level and muscle condition.

As the name indicates, a warm-up tries to increase the temperature by warming your muscles. The correct way of doing it is by gradually going from low-intensity to high-intensity exercises of short duration. It’s not about becoming tired before you even start your training session!

An effective warm-up consists of the following:

• Cardio: to increase your muscle’s temperature and be able to perform other movements easily.
• Joint mobility: warm-up and move your body. This step is important to eliminate gas bubbles trapped in your joints.
• Stretching: stretch tendons, ligaments and muscles by sections. It’s important to point out that dedicating too much time to stretching can negatively affect your muscular performance. That’s why the stretching to improve flexibility is done after your training session.

A warm-up that doesn’t include those requirements can be considered incorrect since it wouldn’t contemplate all the necessary exercises to increase the blood flow and the body temperature.

A warm-up doesn’t just prevent injuries

Warming up is necessary to avoid side stitch or cramps. But, it also has many other benefits that’ll change your mind about skipping your warm-up:

• Improves your proprioception and psychomotor processes.
• Increases your strength levels.
• Promotes blood flow.
• Improves the respiratory condition, the transmission of nerve impulses and reflexes.
• Increases attention span and coordination.
• Distributes the energy among the muscles in concordance with the exercise performed.
• Increases muscular contraction speed.
• Awakens your mind and body.

What are sports injuries?

It’s important to know that a sports injury is not the same as any other type of injury. Basically, sports injuries are those that happen during the exercise and have a different diagnosis and treatment.

Sports injuries can happen for many reasons: poor execution of the exercise, an accident or fall, or by omitting the warm-up. There are different severity levels among the types of injuries, however, you should avoid them at all costs.

Warm-up and risk of injury

When you exercise, you put many parts of your body such as your muscles, ligaments, and joints under strain. It’s your responsibility to make sure your body doesn’t suffer any harm.

Warming up is important before you exercise because it prepares your body for physical activity. Also, when you warm up your muscles, they acquire a better capacity for articulation, extension, and contraction, which provides you with less risk of injury.

Starting your routine without warming up first puts your muscles at risk of tendonitis, rupture of the Achilles tendon, and many other types of injuries that can seriously affect your performance.

Good warm-up = lower injury risk

An ideal warm-up should last a minimum of 15 minutes and a maximum of 20 minutes. As you can see, it doesn’t require much time, so there’s no reason for you to train with cold muscles and expose yourself to the risk of injuries, cramps or pain.

If you want your warm-up to really help you prevent injuries, you must do it the right way and not just do it out of obligation.

It’s important to point out that not all bodies work the same way. Maybe for you, a 10-minute warm-up is enough or maybe you’ll need more time than that. For that reason, you must listen to your body; if you warm-up for 15 minutes and you still feel your muscles are cold, the recommendation is to extend the warm-up a little longer.

Warm-up routines are easy and simple. However, as you progress in physical activity, your warm-ups should vary. You might reach a point where a simple warm-up is not enough to properly prepare all your muscles.

An injury means you’ll need recovery time and you’ll not be able to perform any physical activity. On top of that, once you have recovered from it, you’ll have to be extremely careful and try to avoid it from happening again. Now that you know all of this, it’ll be much better if you’re cautious and do a proper warm-up before working out. You’ll have less risk of suffering an injury.