How to warm up before exercise is a good question! At Blackberry Clinic we treat both amateur and professional sports people and it is a common question our physios get asked, especially by patients who are returning to full fitness after injury. Our multi disciplinary team includes physios, osteopaths, chiropractors, podiatrists and a medical team of Sport & Exercise Medicine, MSK Medicine and Pain Management Doctors and Consultants. We treat MSK conditions like arthritis and frozen shoulder and both chronic and acute sports injuries. Many of our doctors specialise in interventional pain management for back pain, offering epidurals, nerve root blocks and facet joint injections for sciatica, slipped disc and other back pain conditions.
If you have enquiries about your warm up routine and want some guidance do get in touch, especially if you are training for an event or taking up a new sport.
Our physio, Steve Hockham, has put some thought into answering this question, please read on below!
Despite evidence to suggest it may be detrimental, and the fact that professional sports teams and athletes generally do not stretch statically prior to competition, the majority of recreational runners and amateur sports population still report that they do as part of their warm up routine.
Confusion about when and how to stretch is common in recreational sports, so here, we will aim to provide some guidance on how best to prepare for your activity, maximise your performance and try to reduce your injury risk.
Static stretching (holding sustained stretches for any length of time) has long been practiced prior to exercise, however this has been shown to have potentially negative effects on performance, possibly hindering speed and power output, by causing fatigue in the muscles. Sustained stretches of muscles prior to high intensity exercise can put them at increased risk of strain or overload and has not been shown to reduce stiffness or fatigue post work out. It is of course vital to prepare for your sport and to prepare muscles and joints in order to reduce injury risk, however this would be achieved more successfully with a more dynamic warm up involving multi-joint and muscle movements designed to prepare your muscles for the exact activity you are planning to expose them to.
The idea is that you increase blood flow to the structures and mobilise joints and soft tissue by lengthening and shortening them in a controlled way without sustaining long periods of static holding at the ends of their range of movement. For example, leg swings designed to gradually prepare hamstrings rather than static holds. That’s not to say that there is no place for static stretching. It can be used safely after workouts to maintain joint and muscle ranges of motions and to possibly help with the effects of post work out fatigue, but this should be done after any high speed/high intensity muscular work is done and with a period of recovery in mind afterwards.
Along with dynamic stretches, athletic performance will be boosted and injury risk lowered by specific focus on the recruitment and activation of particular muscle groups (such as the gluteal muscle group) which may work to assist some of the bigger movements you will be doing.
Ask one of our specialist physios at Blackberry Clinic about tailoring your warm up to meet your individual needs boosting your performance. Look out for the Blackberry Running Clinic, in which we will talk you through all elements of warming up and cooling down safely, as well as minimising your injury risk generally.
Steve Hockham MCSP
Physiotherapist
Blackberry Clinic Milton Keynes
