How to Prevent Sports Injuries by Warming Up and Cooling Down

If you want to prevent sports injuries you better make time for warm-ups and cool-downs. Sports injury prevention concepts are becoming more accepted by personal athletic trainers, sports doctors, physical therapists and athletes. It is finally starting to sink in and it is about time. The concept is simple; warming up prior to rigorous activity and cooling down afterward prevents injury while skipping warm-ups and cool-downs leads to injury. These two basic principles may save you the heartache of being sidelined from your favorite sport.

Warming up refers to preliminary active use of muscles prior to physical performance. Muscles can be warmed-up passively with hot tub therapy and saunas; soft tissue manipulation like massage, ultrasound therapy or diathermy. This article will focus on the active methods of tissue warm-up. The warm-up increases the core temperatures of organ systems and the musculoskeletal system. It also provides the means of gently and slowly stretching and heating all elements of the soft tissues that will be active during the sport. These tissues include the tendons, ligaments, fascia, collagen fibers and cartilage. For any work load involving an increase in activity the metabolic rate is increased on a cellular, organ system and muscular level. As the body temperature raises, metabolic rate, blood flow and oxygen transport increase as well. The ability of the brain to send messages to the muscles and organ systems and vice versa is obviously important. This process of nerve impulse transmission is accelerated as core temperature rises. All of these physiologic changes adapt more efficiently if the body is properly primed with a decent warm-up. The warm-up effort should be gradual, steady and continue for fifteen to thirty minutes. This allows the body to ready itself for blood sugar, oxygen and adrenaline utilization and to stimulate maximum capillary response within the muscles, heart and lungs.

The type of warm-up performed should center first on a general activity that will stimulate organ systems and muscle globally followed by a more specific approach that targets the muscle of the sport. This activity should not be sport specific. It should just help increase body temperature and directly correlate with the actual sport to be performed. Jump rope, jumping jacks, leg raises, deep squats without weights, push-ups and sit-ups are excellent general exercises to prepare you for any sport. The second part of the warm-up should be sports specific and involve the most dominant aspects of movement with in that sport. Runners for instance should start out with ten to fifteen minutes of jumping jacks, and sit-ups followed by the more sport specific activity of ten to fifteen minutes of light jogging and basic sport specific stretches for the legs and core muscles such as calves, hamstrings, quads and psoas muscles. For those sports that require lifting, throwing or swinging, the muscles of the arm and shoulder should be the major focus in part two of the warm-up. Foot ball players should throw a few light passes. Baseball players should throw a few low to medium velocity pitches or hit a few imaginary balls with an actual bat.

Warm-up is achieved when the body shows an increase in cardiovascular output with heart rate increase and sweating. Try not to allow a cool down period to take place after your warm-up. For the best results, start your main workout no more than fifteen minutes after completing part two of your warm-up.

Many authorities believe that cooling down may be more important than warming up. It allows the body to gradually return to normal resting states of metabolism, cardiac and respiratory output, liver function, and nerve impulse transmission. Recovery should be active in nature and last fifteen to thirty minutes. Active recovery cool-down options such as jogging to walking and stretching during cool-down allows a faster decrease of lactic acid in the muscle tissues and blood level concentrations. Moreover, adequately cooling down after physical activity decreases muscle soreness, increases post-exercise flexibility and mobility and results in less fatigue and faster overall rates of recovery without pain.

The downfall of all of this extra work is that it can add up to an hour of precious time to your workout regimen. However, the extra effort can indirectly save you from the heartache of being sidelined indefinitely from an injury that could have been prevented. It just takes a little more discipline, conviction and dedication to add these sports injury prevention strategies to your routine. Keep up the good work and remember to warm it up and cool it down.