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A Guide To Warming Up

With the football season having recently kicked off and many other sports beginning a new season it is important for any sports person, irrespective of age, level or type of sport played, that they follow a good warm up prior to playing the sport. It has been known for many years that a thorough warm up not only prepares the body for the activity to come, it also helps in ensuring the risks of injury in sport are minimised.

 

There are four areas to think about when warming up for sport;

• Increasing blood flow to the working muscles.

• Increasing the body’s temperature to improve the mobility of the muscles and connective tissue.

• Increasing the range of motion (ROM) in the joints.

• Preparing the nervous system to control the muscles.

 

Increasing blood flow and body temperature

When we start to exercise the body needs to supply the muscles with more blood than at rest. This requires the heart to pump blood faster around the body to the working muscles. It is suggested to increase heart rate gradually by starting with some gentle jogging and to gradually increase to running at intensities similar to that of the sport being played. The jogging will also slowly warm the body up, allowing for the muscles to function better.

 

Increasing ROM of the joints

Many sports require you to move and stretch into positions that do not always occur normally in life. It is important then to ensure that you get the body’s joints used to moving into ranges it is not used to. This used to be done by statically stretching the muscles once they had become warm from the gentle jogging.

 

However research shows that this static stretching may not be as beneficial to injury prevention as first thought. It is now considered better to slowly increase ranges of motion by dynamic stretches. These dynamic stretches should be movements that are similar to those performed during the sport, such as lunging, side stepping, twisting and rotating, and bending. Increasing the stride length when moving from jogging into sprints (as mentioned above) is also a way of increasing the ROM in the lower limbs.

 

Preparing the nervous system

The nervous system is the body’s computer, and it is this that controls the body’s muscles to create movement. This movement may be big powerful movements such as running or jumping or smaller complex movements such as shooting a goal in netball. These movements need to be slowly warmed up to make the action smooth for playing and so it is advised to practice specific movements to your sport at the end of your warm up just prior to starting.