Did you ever know that longer warm ups can actually affect your performance negatively? The age-old belief says that longer warm up increases the temperature of your muscles, accelerates the oxygen uptake kinetics and increases the anaerobic metabolism.
A recent study, conducted by Elias Tomaras, a researcher at the University Of Calgary Faculty Of Kinesiology, has found that longer warm-ups may actually produce a detrimental effect on performance. As a matter of fact, warm-ups or durations of warm-ups in high performance sport has some controversies attached to it!
The opinions vary among the coaches and no research has been able to identify the optimal level of warm-up till date. Tomaras has suggested that athletes may need to consider lowering the intensity and the time of their warm-ups.
Tomaras explained that the study was dedicated to compare a standard warm-up with an experimental one. The experiment consisted of high performance sprint cyclists who were undergoing a conventional warm-up session that lasted for 50 minutes.
The cyclists were performing with a graduated intensity ranging from 60 to 95 percent of the maximal heart rate. The session was to end with a number of all-out sprints. The duration of the experimental warm-up was just 15 minutes and it was performed with a low intensity. It came to an end with just a single sprint. After each warm-up several tests were conducted to measure an athlete's power output and fatigue accurately.
Tomaras said, "What we found was that the shorter warm-up resulted in significantly less muscle fatigue and a peak power output that was 6.2 percent higher. This represents a substantial improvement for an elite athlete." The researcher thinks that sprint athletes should now begin to opt for shorter and less strenuous warm-ups for enhanced performances.
