Sports Warm Up Exercises

Sports warm up exercise is an important part of every sport events. Sports that involve a lot of strength and endurance are especially important to involve warming up before the performance. The reason for this is to not shock the muscles of your body with the sudden speed and strength you give out. Warming up awakens and prepares your muscles for any activity.

Muscles tend to be stiff before any activity. Directly using the stiff muscles for a hard movement and strength-involving activity can cause muscle injury. Thus, doing sports warm-up exercise first before doing the sport can help a lot in slowly reducing the stiffness of the muscle. Warming up also increases our body’s temperature, thus preparing ourselves for any tedious movements. Not only does warming up prepare us physically. It also sets up our minds to what is about to come up, and therefore increases our performance.

Sports warm up exercises include jogging, stretching and other drills involved in your sport. Warming-up steadies our breathing. It helps a lot in preparing oxygen to release at the rate we need it to. Oxygen release from the body is actually increased when the body temperature increases. Thus, we are assured that our breathing could function in the way we need. Our heart rate could also be improved with proper warming up. Our heart rates need to be steadied and brought up to the rate that is needed by our body, through the warming up of our muscles.

Cooling down is also an integral part of every activity as warming up is. Cooling down first before ending an activity is very important so as not to shock our muscles from a tedious activity to a sudden stop and direct rest. Just like when you are warming up, the cooling down process also involves jogging and stretching. Jogging, however, is done at a decreasing rate. You first need to start at a regular pace, and then you need to make it slower and slower before you do a complete stop. Stretching also helps in bringing back to its normal state our used muscles. It helps our muscles to relax and re-align to its normal stage.

Sports warm-up exercise must be practiced by athletes. This is a very important part of any strenuous sport competition. Different sports may also require a different warm-up. A warm up exercise before a swimming is different compared with the ones performed before a marathon. It is believed that warming up properly before any competition decreases the risk of injuries from sports. Furthermore, it is not only sports competition that needs proper warm up, but also even regular exercise.

Eyebrows may raise when I say that a warm up exercise has no really scientific basis to date. It has not been proven yet why it is essential to perform this before any strenuous events. However, if we base it on the experiences of sports enthusiasts, we may be able to obtain some answers. This may not have been scientifically established yet, but it will never really harm us to prevent ourselves from any injury by warming up.