Why Stretching Is More Import Than The Exercise Itself

Normally when you think of exercise the vision of running, jogging, biking, rock climbing, tennis, even golf in some cases may pop into your head. However any and all types of workouts you can think of fail in comparison to the warm up you do in such activities.

Warm ups are by far the most important part of training in every single sport and exercising/workout activity known. Why is it so important?

Warming up is important for a multitude of reasons.

You start getting your muscles use to being worked, it reduces the chances of you getting hurt when you start to do the planned exercise. This is especially important in exercises that work your muscles hard right form the start, such as weight lifting.

You stretch your muscles which lowers the chance of you straining a muscle whilst training. As you know straining a muscle can be a very painful experience and in turn can restrict not only your exercising activities but also your work and social life all the way down to your love life and more.

Doing a warm up actually burns calories and fat in itself, this of course helps you lose weight, stay in shape or tone your body depending what your fitness goals are. Since these afore mentioned reasons are why you are actually exercising in the first place you can easily see why a simple 5 minute warm up will help you achieve your goals.

These are just three reasons why you should do warm ups and you can already see the highly beneficial qualities associated with doing warm ups. They don’t take particularly long, nor are they made to be difficult and straining. They do however enable your body to get slowly use to being worked which in turn makes your body more flexible and ready to take on more strenuous exercise.

A few things to remember are:

• Give yourself at least 5 to 10 minutes to warm up before beginning a work out
• Practice full range of motion for your joints during warm up
• Start out slow and easy, remember it is called warming up for a reason
• Be sure to give yourself 3 to 6 minutes to cool down after a work out
• Practice your breathing during your warm up and cool down
• Pay attention to feelings of pain, if you experience them it’s time to take it easy or back off

NEVER:

• Hold your breath in an effort to reach to strain further
• Skip the warm up or cool down because you are pressed for time
• Just cut the main workout by five minutes instead
• Just quit after a workout and sit down for a break
• Just dive into a workout without warming your muscles up
• Go straight into a run without walking ahead of time

Overextend your stretches just to prove how far you can go.  Within a few days you will notice how much more flexible you already are getting.