The equinox is here and it’s officially winter this week. Cold weather will be the norm over the next few months, unless of course you live in Hawaii. With temperatures dropping, warming up your muscles before exercising is even more important.
The benefits of a warm-up are pretty obvious to those who perform higher intensity exercises such as interval training, sprinting, or heavy resistance training. Perform these activities without a proper warm-up and you’ll notice that your performance drops faster than the temperature during a blizzard in Antarctica.
I know it may be tempting to skip a warm-up and jump right into your workout if you’re not performing higher-intensity exercises. I feel that way all the time! That little voice inside says, “It’s not that important and you don’t have time.”
And I always regret it when I do end up skipping out on the warm-up because I notice a huge difference when I do it versus when I don’t do it. Spending just a few minutes preparing your body for exercise with a proper warm-up, especially when it’s cold, will improve your performance and reduce your risk of injury.
Benefits of a warm-up
Have you ever wondered what actually happens to your body when you warm up? It turns out that one important change, among many, is an increase in muscle temperature.
Now, this may be pretty obvious to you because why else would a warm-up be named as such? But research shows us that changes in muscle temperature are associated with important mechanisms that lead to improved physical performance.
For example, one study demonstrated that a 1 degree celsius increase in muscle temperature enhanced exercise performance by 2 to 5 percent. Of course, this connection between temperature and performance doesn’t mean we should be exercising in Death Valley during the summer or training in blizzard survival jackets in the winter.
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