Exercising regularly is definitely important to lead a healthy life in general. But to enjoy the benefits of your exercise to the fullest, you have to adopt the pre and post exercise rituals- warming up and cooling down.
A good warm up can prepare your body for the exercise. It raises the body temperature and also increases blood flow. This in turn lets your muscles and bones have more of oxygen, improving muscle flexibility and decreases chances of injury and accident. Warm up routines vary from person to person as it is directly related with the intensity and nature of the exercise that is to be performed. One person’s exercise regime can be other person’s warm up schedule and vice a versa. Basically, you should design your warm up in such a way that it energizes you and doesn’t bring you fatigue.
Walks, jogs, and stretches are commonly performed as warm up routines. Start your warm up routine with low-intensity walks or jogs to prepare your muscles for coming activities. Walk slowly for 2-3 minutes then slowly shift to brisk walking or jogging.
After a good walk or jog of about 5 to 10 minutes go for stretching. Do not reverse the order. If you stretch your body without initial warm up, your cold muscles might find it inappropriate and end up troubling you. Also, to avoid exercise injury, stretching is must and to perform stretches up to the optimal level, you need your muscles to be warm and a little elastic. Talking about the nature of stretching, it shall depend upon the exercise you are planning to perform. However, make sure that you are addressing major muscles and joints. All in all, warm up prepares you for the exercise, physically and mentally.
While it is important to increase body temperature before exercise, it is also important to bring it back to normalcy post workout. Otherwise, you may encounter injury. When you exercise, your blood circulation and heart beats get pumped up. If the strenuous exercise activities are stopped all of a sudden, your heart might get unnecessary stress. Also, during exercising, the blood pool in the large muscles is higher so if the transition is not taken care of with a cool down, you might feel dizzy. Increased blood circulation during workout shall also be brought to normalcy, if not a sudden drop in blood pressure can be experienced.
A regular cool down exercise set consists of short slow walks, mild stretching and may be some yoga. If you are a water baby then opt for swimming or if you love to shake a leg then dancing too would do. Walking slowly would bring back energy flow to normalcy. Stretching helps to bring back your muscles to regularity and can reduce their temperature. Yoga on the other hand calms down breathing and heart rate.
So make sure that your workout is accompanied by a minimum 15 minutes warm up session and a minimum 10 minutes cooling down session.