Transcript
0:05 Let's talk about warm-ups. How do we get ready to perform on race day or for a workout? I think this is really important, but it's often under understood or underutilized. So, let's break it all down from the science to the practice. We're going to give it all. So, I want to start with this is there's different kinds of warm-ups for different situations and largely we're going to f focus on warming up for a workout or a race. If we look at easy runs, yes, there's often some benefit to doing some sort of easy dynamic warm-up to get prepared or more so to give you some sort of injury prevention type work or drills to get ready or movement in different directions. But another simplistic way you can do this is to copy the Kenyons and jog really slow for the first part of your easy or recovery run.
1:02 This is why Elliot Kipchig often starts his runs at something like 9minute mile pace, which for him is insanely slow. It's a way to ease into the work before he starts getting going. When we talk about warming up for a workout or race, there's a couple things that matter. First we have to consider the physiology. What we know is that we need our body to essentially elevate its energetic processes to put us in a position where we can perform or even feel good doing so. That means elevating our V2, so oxygen uptake, elevating our heart rate, increasing muscle or core body temperature a little bit. things tend to function better. Whether we're looking at the muscle increasing the temperature slightly or if we're looking at the energetics of energy systems increasing slightly, priming slightly, they perform better and function better when they're activated a little bit. One of the reasons why is if we look at the energy systems simplistically we can break them down into three types. the fastest one which is PCR phosphocreatine system which is like our instantaneous if we if I was to get up and sprint right now in the first couple steps my phosphocreatine system it's stored it's quick it's easy to use would power the energy you needed in my muscles but it's quick and fast acting but it's depleted within seconds. So we also have our glycolysis or sometimes called anorobic glycolysis which is also pretty dang fast which takes 15, 30, 45 seconds depending on the type of exercise to rev up to a high level and provide a high level of energy but it also isn't longasting because it comes with some fatiguing byproducts that accumulate at the same time. So what generally happens is it takes 30, 45, sometimes longer seconds to get up to a good take, but then after a minute or two, it starts not being able to supply the energy fully because of fatigue. Which brings us to our third and slower energy system, the aerobic system, which again they all start revving up at the same time, but the aerobic system takes 90 seconds, 60, 90 seconds, 2 minutes, depending on the situation to rev up to where it's taking a large dose of the load. Now, the good thing about the aerobic system is its fatigue ability is low. So, it stays revved up for a really long time, but it doesn't supply as much energy as needed.
3:49 Often, if we go really fast or if we go anything faster than 10kish pace, depending on the math, sometimes a little slower, sometimes it's a little faster depending on the speed it takes you to run or the time it takes you to run. But we need the other energy systems to step in there. So when we look at the energetics of it, what we're trying to do is we don't have to start everything from zero. I don't have to say, "Hey, I'm going to get up from this desk and sprint and good luck." A warm-up elevates our physiology so that essentially instead of taking 90 seconds to get that aerobic system primed and pumping and doing all this good stuff is we can get there quicker. So that's one of the reasons why we warm up to elevate our heart rate, physiology, energy systems, prime them that so we start from 50% instead of 0%. It's no different than on a really cold day, especially in older cars, what did you have to do? You had to go turn on the car to warm it up to let the engine flow instead of just revving it out from the get-go and hoping it worked. Our body is often the same, especially our energy systems. So, we're going to talk about the balance though between doing enough to prime our aerobic system, especially to be prepared, versus doing too much where we create fatigue. So, we're starting the race in a slightly fatigued state. It's a balance to be had. The second thing that really matters when it comes to warm-up is what I call muscle tension, which is essentially how poppy or responsive your muscles feel. We all have a different set resting muscle tension. And that will vary. If I send you on a plane ride and you're stuck in a seat, crammed, knees bent for four, five hours, and you get up and you try and jog after that, guess what? your muscle tension will have adapted and often shortened in that position so that you try and jog and everything feels kind of stiff and tight and you feel flat and sluggish. Why? Muscle tension has adapted to sitting in the chair. No different when we come to preparing to races. We have to raise often or increase the muscle tension to make it feel responsive. the poppy where it's at optimum length in terms of the cross fibers coming over and connecting so it can contract in a nice place and have some elastic energy and a nice responsive state. How do we do that? We do reactive work. Some pio, some jumps, some faster running, some strides, some near sprints. Those things all raise muscle tension to make us feel more pop.
6:36 So, if those are the two characteristics, what does a good warm-up look like? So, I like to see it as we're trying to do a crescendo in terms of our physiology and also our mechanics and muscle tension to get us in the right place to perform in the minutes before the gun goes off or the race occurs. The way we do this is we start off with slow and easy, an easy jog or run to just get the muscle temperature up, get the physiology going, energetic system up, but it's easy and controlled. We were not creating much fatigue at all. How long depends on if you're novice, if you're expert, what race you're training for, but generally between 10 to 20 minutes, sometimes a little less of easy aerobic stuff. It's what we're looking at. From there, what we often go into is dynamic drills. Now, these serve two purposes.
7:36 These dynamic drills a help with muscle tension because often if you look at the various skips, they have a reactive component which takes us from the slow jogging and getting stuck on the ground to some nice pop and reactivity off the ground when we're doing A skips, B skips, the various exercises like that. And B, they start to take us through a greater range of motion. Okay, which helps prepare us for going from going slow to going pretty dang fast, whether we're talking about a marathon or a mile or faster, pretty dang fast where we're going through an extended range of motion. The other part of drills is they also help us move in different planes of movement which help prepare our body so that we have a slightly reduced injury risk because we're preparing it to move both from a muscle or tendon standpoint and from a joint standpoint of going through different motions. A lot of people in this section ask where's the static stretching? The old school touch your toes. Here's the deal. The research on that shows that if we only do static stretching, it actually tends to impair performance because it sends a signal, our brain gets a signal that says, "Oh, this muscle when we stretch it, we are essentially creating stretch and hold.
8:56 We're essentially creating slight micro tears. We're changing the muscle tension and putting in a place where we're not really performing well." So, this is why research shows that there's almost a neural inhibition effect from stretching. and you tend to see decreases in performance, especially around sprint and power exercises. Now, the good news is this is for whatever reason, if you want to do some static stretching, if you did dynamic stuff and some explosive stuff afterwards, it tends to negate that effect on the research. But in general, there's not much static stretching you need unless there's something related to a specific area that is a pain point, which there's some research that shows some static stretching can like disinhibit that pain receptor a little bit. So, you don't feel it as much, which could be good, could be bad, depends on the situation.
9:47 Okay, we go through our dynamic warm-up and then it's all about how to maximize that physiology while keeping the fatigue low and the tension. So, what we have here is often a elongated or longer stride or acceleration. The reason being is we need to create a little bit of fatigue to essentially prime not only your aerobic system high enough but also to get that anorobic system where it's utilizing producing just a little bit of lactate. Your aerobic system starts to utilize a little bit not too much fatigue. You're priming the pump. Okay.
10:24 There was a wonderful study on 800 runners where it took them through a variety of warm-ups and when they added a extended stride. So instead of your traditionally what we do is we do a handful of 60 meter excels something pretty fast longer rest between when they add in an extended stride I think it was around 200 m at near race pace it improved performance. I forget the exact timing on this but somewhere five to 10 minutes before the race somewhere in that realm is what happens is that extended long stride has a longer effect of raising our physiology and getting just enough fatigue but it's long enough before the race where we have this sweet spot where the fatigue dissipates but the physiology is still ele elevated so we're primed to go when the gun goes off. The other half of this is shorter strides which are those 60 meter excels, those 50 meters excels, 40 meters, whatever has it. And those are essentially to increase muscle tension.
11:23 So we start to feel poppy and reactive off the ground. Now, if these handful of strides aren't enough, you can also do things like jump rope, short hops, some reactive pio. This is why you often see sprinters right before they get in the blocks do one final huge jump up in the air. You're creating some power, some tension to prepare you to get ready to perform. So the thing is it's this nice crescendo of physiology of muscle tension to prepare you to feel poppy and reactive when you're lining up your energetic system activated and primed just enough where everything is a little bit elevated but not so much that fatigue is sticking around. And when you find that sweet spot that's what it is. Now, one caveat here is that it's going to differ for each race. So, the 800, you're going to need more kind of tension increases and more reactive stuff. If we look at the marathon, we want to decrease that warm-up a little bit because we don't want to utilize the fuel that we're going to need at some point to run. So what that means is often in the marathon instead of a 15 20 minute easy jog you do a mile maybe or seven minutes something like that and then go through a modified version of your drills and not that much of elongated stride because you don't want to use up too much energy. You're essentially preparing yourself well enough where you can run at marathon pace in mile one knowing you might not feel that great until mile two as you use the beginning part of the race to perform. Well, in shorter races, we want to be prepared and ready to go when the gun goes off so that we feel good getting off the line.
13:07 That's the basics of the warm-up. It's the physiology of it, the mechanics of it. Hopefully, that helps you understand why we do it. We can add all sorts of nuance and layers depending on the individuality of the athlete and what they respond to, whether they're more fast twitch orientated or slow twitch orientated. But that general structure is what we use to prepare for workouts or races. One of the ways you can tell is your warm-up appropriate, especially in workouts, is to ask yourself, do you feel good on rep number one or do you feel better on two, three, four? Right? And sometimes what happens, rep number one, let's say we're doing 400 meter repeats, rep number one kind of feels a little shaky and sucks. And then rep number two feels a little better. Rep number three, you start feeling great. Okay? If that happens to you, it gives you an indicator that you're if this was a race and you're warming up, that warm up is not sufficient to get you prepared to feel good from the get-go, which you need to in the race. So, we need to add some more intensity. Maybe a longer stride that's a little closer to the race or if you feel a little bit flat. We need some more reactive work building into that.
14:23 And that gives you an idea of how to fine-tune your warm-up. Thanks so much for watching. We hope that you enjoy this and take some good information. If you enjoy it, subscribe, like, share. It helps the channel grow. And that's what we're here to do is bring good information that is quality, evidence-based, and validated by a lifetime of practice in the arena.