When it’s time to fit in your run, you want to get OUT there. Our time is limited, so who has more for a warm-up?
We hear you. Not to mention that when it’s 157 degrees outside in summer in Charlotte — the term “warm up” can seem downright silly. The warm up is important though, for a lot of reasons.
As Dr. Doug Bradberry of Greenapple Sports notes, “A good warmup is important for both injury prevention and your body’s ability to train well. It is time well spent.”
Our muscles get “cold” and tight when we don’t use them for a period of time. Think about taffy…if it’s ice cold and you tweak it, it’s more likely to snap than if it’s all warm and flexible. You want to be the flexible taffy.
By doing a warm up, our heart rate is gradually increased as opposed to going from average to Zone 5 in a matter of 5 seconds. No one likes to feel as if their heart may explode.
So what should you do? “Anything that elevates your heart rate will warm the body and be beneficial, but a good warmup will focus on the movement patterns that you need for the workout”, says Bradberry. “You want to get the joints moving in the direction you need and get blood to the muscles that you are going to use. With running, we want to get the legs moving forwards and backwards.”
Our friend Phil Sanford, who is an RRCA running coach, agrees. “Starting cold could open your body up to injury if you start the run with a burst of speed and energy. A warm-up could be as simple as a jog for a few minutes followed by dynamic stretching. The three dynamic stretches that I recommend to all runners before a run are high knees, butt kicks, and skips.” These don’t take a lot of time and have proven to be very effective at waking up the body.
“After sitting at a desk all day, your muscles fall asleep! Your muscles need to be reminded that it is time to fire so activation exercises are important before any run,” says Kelly Fillnow, coach at Fillnow Coaching and tri-athlete extraordinaire.
“Our go to activation exercises include standing fire hydrants with a band, lateral walks with a band, and the Running Man. All of these exercises will help to target the sleepy glutes and will get your body prepared to run.”
In the absence of all time and if you simply can’t fit in a set of dedicated warm-up exercises, you should at least start your run at a substantially slower pace than your usual for about a mile.
Make the time for a few minutes of warming up, yes even when it’s the dead of summer, and your body will be happier.
If you know Arun, you know he is an ambitious runner. He’s run marathons all over the world, and each year brings a new focus for him — his AAA plan. (He’s on his 7th “A” year by the way, with the 8th planned for 2022.) His 4th “A,” in 2018, was “Adaptation” — a year of learning to run without shoes. He made his mistakes, and adapted to that, too. We’ll hear more from him in a minute — but first, the research.
But back to Arun: He trained himself to run barefoot in 2018 and enjoyed the results. He got the idea while running the New York Marathon in 2016, when he encountered a barefoot runner around mile 16, and talked to him for a few miles (whew!). He was fascinated by the idea. He read Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, which focuses on a Mexican tribe that runs barefoot or in the thinnest of foot protection.
In fact, and this is a good training note: apply both of these tips to training as well as races. Arun recommends sidewalks and greenways for bare feet, as they are generally more clear of debris than streets.
“We typically see this in runners appear in the form of a hip drop as shown in the below image, where you see the athlete’s non-weight-bearing hip lower than his stance leg. As running volume progresses on a weaker muscle group, it will often get to a point of being overloaded and then become painful,” says Long.