Cooling Down After Exercise: 6+ Helpful Tips

After any workout (cardio or weights) your muscles are tired and very quickly begin breaking down in order to rebuild. That time, right after you finish exercising, is a critical time for muscle tissue repair, strength building, and overall recovery. That is where your cool-down comes into play.

The obvious and perhaps main goal of your cool-down is to gradually bring your heart rate down to a closer-to-normal resting rate. And yes, you can accomplish that by simply walking out of the gym and sitting in your car as you drive to the coffee shop for a celebratory frappé, but there is more to it than that.

Those clever folks who make time to indulge in a thorough and perhaps even luxurious cool-down report that the sheer ritual of their cool-down helps with mental clarity and also gives them a healthy and satisfying sense of accomplishment. I don’t think anyone gets that from sitting in a cold car in traffic.

Now not all of us have time for what I would call a luxurious cool-down, but there must be a middle ground. To find that, let’s look at the actual benefits of a good cool-down and how we can achieve them.

Cool-down Benefit: Blood Flow

At its most basic, a cool-down after a workout simply keeps the blood circulating at a comfortable rate throughout the body.

At its most basic, a cool-down after a workout simply keeps the blood circulating at a comfortable rate throughout the body. After a workout ends, you ideally would continue some activity but begin to perform it at a slower and slower pace, until you are moving at a normal non-workout pace. This can often take at least five minutes, but can definitely last a lot longer.

Strenuous exercise causes the blood vessels in your arms and legs to expand, bringing more blood into the legs, hands, and feet. Stopping suddenly, especially after a hard effort, can cause you to feel light-headed. Stopping suddenly can also cause your heart rate and blood pressure to drop rapidly. This is one of the most obvious and perhaps most serious reasons for a cool-down.

The risk of actually passing out or losing consciousness is greater in very fit athletes because their heart rates can slow down faster and their veins can also hold more blood than the rest of us. Casual exercisers may not be at a high risk of passing out but it is still important to do something even as simple as walking at a decent pace from the weight room to the locker room to prevent dizziness.

After any physical activity, your heart is very likely to be beating faster than it normally does, your body temperature is higher, and your blood vessels are more dilated than usual. When your blood vessels are dilated (the opposite of constricted) the flow of your blood is increased due to a decrease in what is called vascular resistance. So, dilation of your arterial blood vessels (mainly the arterioles) decreases your overall blood pressure, temporarily. This means if you stop too fast, you could potentially pass out or at least feel sick and woozy.

Cool-down Benefit: Stretching and Rolling

After you complete a workout is also the perfect time to get a good stretch on because your muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints are still warm. Stretching and foam rolling when your muscles are warm can improve your overall flexibility, which has been thought to help prevent future injury and increase our range of motion. Also, let’s face it, stretching after a hard session feels darn good.

A great way to cool down is to stretch every major muscle group. I suggest holding each stretch for 20-30 seconds while doing some deep diaphragmatic breathing. Remember that stretching should never be painful, you should feel some tension in the muscle releasing as the muscle is being stretched but you should not feel pain. If you do, relax the stretch and breathe.

Cool-down Benefit: Muscle Length

One of the byproducts of exercise is a thing that some people refer to as muscle bunching. Muscle bunching is more like your body wanting to stay in the position it is currently in. Similar to when you stand up in the theatre after watching a long movie and your legs don’t seem to want to straighten.

To understand this, let’s picture someone on the Leg Curl machine. When that person finishes the workout, they are left with the feeling of having semi-bent legs and if they don’t do something to counteract that, it could become more than just a feeling. Cramps and muscle spasms can ensue.

This can affect performance adversely. A tight muscle is a less efficient muscle, producing less force and power.

This feeling can actually be beneficial during a hockey game or while you are on a long bike ride because you want the position that the activity puts you in to feel normal for the duration of the event. But between training sessions or games, this feeling can lead to hypertonic muscles which is the amount of contraction that remains even when a muscle is not actively working. It also can lead to an increased risk of muscle strain or with an even longer-term view, an actual loss of joint range of motion.

I probably don’t need to tell you that this can affect performance adversely. A tight muscle is a less efficient muscle, producing less force and power.

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Cool-down Benefit: The Mental Aspect

Mental recovery is an often overlooked part of the workout. Sure, we all lead busy lives and it can be difficult to allocate the time that we need to adequately relax and let our mind calm down after a hard workout but relaxation techniques are extremely useful tools that help you with recovery and even preparation for your next workout.

Even if you just take a few minutes to do some deep breathing, some meditation, or a few yoga poses, this can help you reflect on your performance during this session and to mentally prepare for your next session. Taking the time to process what you just accomplished, where you succeeded and where you failed, what felt good and what needs more work, is an important part of making progress as an athlete, and the cool-down is the perfect time to incorporate this important part of the mental game. I strongly encourage the athletes that I coach to write a few post-activity comments immediately after each workout. We can then review those notes at the end of each week before I plan out their next week.

In his book, Mass Made Simple, author and bodybuilder Dan John says: “I have had cool-downs that consisted of me sitting on a bench for a long time trying to figure out how to drive home. I have also had long, lovely cool-downs of sauna, steam, and whirlpool.”

He goes on to point out a simple but overlooked point; the cool-down is a transition from the gym back to real life. “It is a good time... to do more mobility work and maybe even work some kinks out. I have worked on technical things during a cool-down and found it effective for me to unwind from the load. Do something for a few minutes to make sure your heart has slowed down and your brain can make two connected thoughts.”

What a Cool-Down Doesn’t Do

For a long time, we coaches would tell our athletes and clients that they needed to do a cool-down so they wouldn’t get sore the next day. It turns out that although I still swear that it helps me, that notion isn’t supported by the science.

In a study that looked at the effect of warm-up and cool-down exercise on delayed onset muscle soreness in the quadriceps muscle, a group of 36 active adults were put through a difficult lunge workout while holding barbells. One group of the volunteers warmed-up beforehand (riding a stationary bicycle for 20 minutes) another group didn’t warm-up but did a cool-down after the exercise (again, casually riding the bike for 20 minutes). The remainder of the volunteers lunged and immediately hit the showers.

The next day, all of the volunteers did a pain threshold test, in which their muscles were prodded until they reported discomfort. The volunteers who did the warm-up were relatively pain-free. The folks who did the cool-down had a much lower pain threshold (meaning that it took less to cause them pain). In fact, they were in the same amount of pain as the control group who skipped the warm-up and cool-down.

Another study that looked at the effect of immediate post-training active and passive recovery interventions on anaerobic performance and lower limb flexibility put 31 professional soccer players through benchmark tests on vertical leap, sprinting speed, agility, and leg muscle flexibility before taking part in a normal soccer practice. After practice, they had some of the players simply sit on a bench for 20 minutes, while others did a cool-down which included 12 minutes of jogging and eight minutes of stretching.

The players repeated the physical tests the next day and also answered questions about how sore they were. And although the measures of muscle soreness across the groups were the same, the cool-down group could leap higher the next day than the players who sat around for 20 minutes—which I count as a big win for team cool-down.

The available cool-down data “quite strongly suggests a cool-down does not reduce post-exercise soreness.” But it’s also important to note that “none of the scientific research shows any negative effects due to performing a cool-down.”

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How to Cool-Down Effectively?

First, let’s recap our goals. We want to:

• Bring your heart rate and breathing back to normal.
• Prevent fainting or dizziness.
• Remove lactic acid byproducts and metabolites which build up during vigorous activity.
• Reduce the post-exercise tendency for muscle spasm or cramping.
• Increase flexibility.
• Return our body to a normal position.
• Reflect on this workout and make plans for the next one.

So with that in mind, this is what I did after my killer, 57-minute indoor “Spinerval” cycling workout this morning:

1. After the official part of the workout was done, I spent about five minutes working my way through the gears, making the cycling effort easier and easier, until my breathing and heart rate were pretty much normal.

2. Got off the bike, towelled off (I am a heavy sweater) and proceeded to stretch my calves, hip flexors, quads, lumbar, neck, and shoulders out on my yoga mat.

3. Then I grabbed my foam roller and went to town on all my major muscles groups. At least 10 rolls on each part, followed by about 10 extra rolls on the areas that I consider to be my trouble spots.

4. After putting the foam roller aside, I got myself in a comfortable kneeling position in the middle of the mat and proceeded to do six sets of Box Breaths.

5. Now that I was nicely stretched out and my nervous system was good and calm, this was the perfect time to write some quick notes on my workout. I wrote: “Great start. Nailed the paces and heart rates. At 47 minutes I started to suffer and wanted to quit. Geared up a couple cogs and took the fourth interval easy. Came back for the last set good and strong.”

6. Then I flipped the page on my training schedule and reviewed what workout I have planned for tomorrow.

I consider not only reviewing today’s workout but also previewing tomorrow’s workout to be part of the cool-down because we can learn from today’s workout and also prepare for tomorrow’s. I now know that I have a bike-swim-bike workout tomorrow morning. That means I need to wake up at a particular time (so I can get to the pool in time to use the awesome 50m lanes). It also means that I can lay out all the gear I need before I go to bed tonight (so I don’t sleepily forget my trunks...again). It also means that I can mentally begin to prepare myself for the particulars of this somewhat complicated workout.

Although this part of the cool-down does not convey an acute effect, it does have a lasting effect on me as a whole athlete who is calm, methodical, and on top of his training, rather than constantly rushed, tired and haphazard. And doesn’t that sound like a better way to live and a more likely way to succeed?

If this all sounds like too much and not something you are likely to do, at least try this: finish your workout by briskly walking for two minutes, then perform a lunging hip flexor stretch with arms overhead, a seated hamstring stretch, and a series of shoulder rotations. Then, if you can spare the time, hit a foam roller for a few minutes.

You wouldn’t shut the engine in your car off without first gently applying the break, putting it into park, and taking off your seatbelt, would you? Not if you want your car to last you wouldn’t. Think of your cool-down that same way. If you want your investment in your body to last longer than an old used car, you need to take care of it. After all, it’s the only one you have. 

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