Molokai Fitness: Warming Up

Community Contributed

By Ayda Ersoy

Do you warm up properly before you start your exercise, and cool down at the end?

A good warm-up helps increase your heart rate before you start your exercise, it raises your body temperature and increases the blood flow to your muscles to get your muscles ready for action. This will help you burn more calories during your exercise. It will also help minimize potential muscle tears and injury, and can also help improve your muscle strength.

A warm-up also helps you focus more on your workout, and that will lead to a more effective workout and better results. It increases your flexibility, muscle metabolism and the removal of lactic acid.

Depending on the intensity of your working you can start with a joint mobility warm-up (you can watch a video of this on my website molokaifitness.com) followed by some stretching. This is great before any type of workout, whether in the gym, paddling, running or whatever you choose.

Generally 10 minutes of warm-up is ideal. You can also do some dynamic stretching to improve performance. If you’re doing a heavy-weight workout then you can do one or two sets of the same exercise with much lighter weights, before you move on to the heavy weights. You’ll see much more benefit from your heavy weight workouts after this.

After your warm-up, you will be ready physically and mentally for a great workout!

Of course, don’t forget to cool down properly after your workout. You can do some light stretching, or if you’ve been doing cardio exercise you can slow down your speed gradually and finish off slowly.

A good warm-up and cool-down will keep you ready for your next workout pain free!

Enjoy your workouts!