warm-up/stretching

[michael]

http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/docs/rec/stretching/stretching_5.html#SEC39

Does this seem like a decent way to structure things?

[Joshua Naterman]

This is easy to mis-interpret, and fails to make a few very important clarifications, and misses one very key point.

The basic structure is correct. Get your body warm with 5-10 minutes of basic moving around. Jump rope, jog, do jumping jacks, anything that gets your heart rate and temperature up. Joint swings are important. Start slow and build up to maximum velocity! You will only reach maximum ROM with maximum velocity, and the high speed and relatively high force wakes up the nervous system and prepares it to really work hard!

Static stretching is iffy. If you choose to perform static stretches, keep the holds under 10 seconds. More than that turns on inhibitory protective reflexes and will make you slower and weaker by around 10% for the next 15 minutes or so, which completely defeats the purpose of warming up: getting you ready for maximal efforts!

The dynamic stretching should either be done after the statics or relatively slowly at first. Personally, I tend to prefer a few short sets of static stretches first because it seems to loosen me up better for the dynamics. Slowly ramp these up until you're at maximum velocity!

One word of caution: Take a few weeks to slowly work up to true maximum velocity. At first, just go as fast as you're comfortable with, and increase very slightly a few times a week until you literally can't go any faster. It takes time for the body to adapt to that speed, but once it does you will do much better in your workouts!

Sport specific: It's a good idea to use isometric and plyometric movements as nervous system primers during this part of your warm up. For us, outside of isometrics and plyometrics, this would mean starting at the bottom of the progression and doing one set of each until you get to where you're doing work sets. If you're doing the first progression as work sets, either find a way to do these even easier for two sets or do less than your normal work set, preferably half the number of reps for two sets.

The cool down: This is one of the biggest controversies in sports training. There is no evidence, according to the man who writes the ACSM's manuals, that there is any benefit whatsoever to a cool down. Stretching, yes. But taking extra time to slowly ramp down the body's temperature and heart rate? No evidence at all. There are conflicting studies about benefits, but nothing has found any bad effects from skipping the cool down. Not only that, you are at your most flexible when you are at your hottest! Use that time for static and dynamic stretching, not slowly doing some other crap to cool down!

Lactic acid: You WANT THE LACTIC ACID!!! You WANT it to stay in the muscle! Lactic acid has nothing to do with post-exercise soreness. Nothing. Zero. Any questions on that part? Post-exercise soreness is due to protein damage. Now, why do we want lactic acid? It causes local levels of growth hormone to skyrocket. This leads to better training adaptations, meaning in plain Engrish(sic) that you will make better gains with each workout when you let your body process the lactic acid where it is instead of trying to get it all circulating! Stretching will move some of it, but not all.

[michael]

thanks for the reply,

When you say that joint mobility and dynamic stretches should be worked up to maximum velocity,do you mean i should eventualy be moving as hard and as fast as possible?

If i was to add prehab type exercises(shoulder mobility/stability stuff similar to ido portals vidoes,etc),when do you think they should be done?,my guess would be sport specific?

On the lactic-acid/cool down point, when you say that lactic acid is a good thing, has nothing to do with soreness and will actually help you grow stronger and adapt better if left where it is. Does that mean that if at a period of time i was really focusing on gaining strength and trying progress workout to workout i should not do any post workout activity (static stretching etc)untill i had achieved those strength gains , and only add the post workout stretching when flexibility was my focus?

I should be getting the book Stretching Scientifically soon, hopefully it will be of some help.

[Blairbob]

You can focus on stretching on your off days if you want.

Static stretching is still useful if your ROM is inhibited. In this case, I would use some static stretching to open up ROM, especially if a muscle is too tight to begin with. For instance, one of my guys came to workout hobbling because apparently they did a heap of leg work in karate class yesterday. So we spent quite a bit of time today just working on stretching his legs and by the end of practice he was almost walking normally. It was so bad, he could hardly do walking lunges or deck squats early on. Of course, I was fairly miffed that he was gonna come into workout this way in the first place.

You can work mobility series after or during/as the warmup or before/after an event. For a swing event, some shoulder/elbow mobility might be a good thing and hip/knee/ankle mobility after say vaulting or tumbling. You might want to do a small portion of it to warmup for vaulting or tumbling, as well. Stuff like one leg hop/runs, skips, etc as this may get some bloodflow in the joint. The point it has to just be enough to not cause fatigue but WARMUP.

[Joshua Naterman]

thanks for the reply,

When you say that joint mobility and dynamic stretches should be worked up to maximum velocity,do you mean i should eventualy be moving as hard and as fast as possible?

If i was to add prehab type exercises(shoulder mobility/stability stuff similar to ido portals vidoes,etc),when do you think they should be done?,my guess would be sport specific?

On the lactic-acid/cool down point, when you say that lactic acid is a good thing, has nothing to do with soreness and will actually help you grow stronger and adapt better if left where it is. Does that mean that if at a period of time i was really focusing on gaining strength and trying progress workout to workout i should not do any post workout activity (static stretching etc)untill i had achieved those strength gains , and only add the post workout stretching when flexibility was my focus?

I should be getting the book Stretching Scientifically soon, hopefully it will be of some help.

Excellent questions!

Eventually yes, you will be moving as fast and therefore as hard as possible. Don't try to accomplish this in any given time frame. Take your time, especially with the leg stuff. You should only do what feels safe. You'll know, because as time goes on the same thing will feel less intense, and at that point you put more into it. For the shoulders, you're talking about a different type of joint and therefore different rules apply. For the shoulder warm up like arm circles, you should be able to work up to maximum velocity pretty quickly, in a few weeks if you do it every day for sure. Perhaps much faster. I did it in a few days, but I already have pretty well-conditioned shoulders.

For your mobility work, you should do that right before the sport specific stuff. You could technically group it in that category, but your pre-hab should be the first thing you do in your sport specific stuff.

You really don't need to worry about dropping post-workout stretching, because the benefits of re-lengthening the muscles after a workout far outweight whatever small amount of lactic acid you move out of the tissue. You will not flush very much without specific protocols for flushing, like contrast showers and a "cool down" along with specific post-workout massage. Doing these several hours later, after the lactic acid has been metabolized, is absolutely an outstanding idea and will help immensely, but that's a separate issue. If you want, you could limit your post workout stretching to static stretching when you are in a strength cycle, but I would suggest you do one strength cycle with dynamics and statics, and then one with just statics, and see if there is even a difference to you!

I would not even worry about a "cool down," if that were seriously an issue we would not survive marathons. Watch at the end of the olympic running events. Gymnastic events. Pretty much anything! You don't see them doing any cooldown work, they just walk away and sit. They get their hearts going far beyond what most people ever will. Your body is quite capable of not dying without a cooldown lol!

Even regular people easily handle getting off the treadmill and driving home without dying. Hell, even obese people do just fine!

Like blair said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing some stretching on off days. You may even want your most intense stretch days to be a stretch only day!