As a strength coach at Tipp High School, one of my main goals is to put our athletes in position to perform at the highest level possible, and one of the ways to do that is by incorporating a proper warm up and a proper cool down into their workouts or into their sports season before they go to practice or after games. When we talk about warm up or what’s a proper warm up, we try to incorporate some sort of light activity to increase the heart rate enough to get the blood flowing and get the oxygen to the muscles before they go into their activity. This allows them to have better flexibility, have better reaction time, the muscles and joints will be more prepared to accommodate to the stress they put on them in the games. When I talk about athletes playing where it’s football, basketball, baseball, we try to look at whether we do a dynamic warm up or a static stretch warm up. When we get into sports with the high intensity we tend to do more dynamic warm up. A dynamic warm up is more . . . you see it more when you go to sporting events . . . it’s more high knees, lunges, things that incorporate a lot of different planes of motion in order to mimic the stress they’ll have in their games. If we talk about the general population or someone who’s just getting into working out, and we’re trying to do a warm up with them, it might be something as easy as walking on the treadmill for two or three minutes or riding a stationary bike for a couple of minutes before they stretch. It’s an easy type of activity that will allow the heart rate to increase enough that we warm the muscles up by getting oxygen to the muscle. When we talk about cool downs after the event, let’s talk about physical sports or aggressive sports. With a cool down usually we want to make sure we don’t just stop playing and then stop doing activity because then we look at building up muscle soreness and things like that. When we’re done with our activity our muscles are actually at their warmest rate, their warmest temperature and that’s when we can work on flexibility and actually gain some flexibility so that’s when we always add some sort of static stretch component or we take a stretch hold it at the end range for 20 to 30 seconds and sometimes as much as a minute and let the muscle lengthen out while it’s warmed up. This helps push out some of the stuff that’s in the muscle that causes some of that soreness the next day. It also allows us to gain flexibility and helps us recover quicker so we can come back the next day and perform again at the same level. Other ways we look at cool downs especially with the general population as well as normal athletes, we look at nutrition levels. We make sure they get some sort of protein within 30 minutes of an event. That helps restore and replenish the muscles when they are at their highest need, to help them recover quicker for the next day and next event. The other thing is hydration. That’s another thing that goes into our cool down as well. We usually make the athletes drink 20 ounces of water for every pound lost at the end of an event. That makes sure they stay hydrated. If we’re dehydrated it leads to increased muscle soreness and decreased performance the next day as well. There are a couple of different components to a cool down. One of the main things to the cool down for the general population if it’s something where someone has done a workout and they need to make sure they allow the body to recover. They can just decrease the intensity of whatever aerobic activity they’re doing just enough to flush the lactic acid out of their muscles. They can stretch a little bit, a static stretch program to increase their flexibility and make sure they recover quicker for the next day. That’s kind of the difference between the warm up and the cool down periods. They are very integral in terms of making sure we’re getting our athletes where they need to be to perform at the highest levels possible. Both of those are very important in terms of injury prevention. Warm up is important as far as injury prevention because it’s allowing our muscles to adapt so we’re not just taking them right out onto the field or onto whatever activity they’re doing without having the proper oxygen and proper warm up to their muscles. A cool down is very important for injury prevention because it’s allowing us to get some of the stuff out of the muscle that if we don’t get it out it’s going to prevent our performance the next day. It’s going to make us sore, have some delayed onset muscle soreness. So, a cool down in terms of nutrition and hydration as well are very important and they all go together to help injury prevention as well.
