When I first trained up as a fitness instructor almost 13 years ago we were taught that the body requires a formal period of cooling down after a workout or competition. We were told that by slowing down, lessening the intensity of the workout and transitioning out of physical activity, followed by stretching, that we would prevent muscle soreness, improve limberness and speed physiological recovery. All of this would allow us to perform better physically the next day than if we hadn’t cooled down. But I no longer include cool downs in any of my sessions. Why? Because under scientific scrutiny, none of those beliefs stand up well. In one study, a group of participants were split in to three groups where they all performed the same workout. One group warmed up beforehand, one group didn’t warm up but cooled down after the exercise and the rest neither warmed up nor cooled down. The next day, all of the participants submitted to a pain threshold test, in which their muscles were prodded until they reported discomfort. The volunteers who’d warmed up before exercising had the highest pain threshold, meaning their muscles were relatively pain-free. Those who’d cooled down, on the other hand, had a much lower pain threshold; their muscles hurt. The cool-down group’s pain threshold was, in fact, the same as among the control group. Cooling down had bought the exercisers nothing in terms of pain relief. Similarly, in two other studies published whereby professional soccer players in Spain underwent a similar experiment whereby all the players performed a workout that would generally lead to muscle soreness. Afterward, some of the players simply stopped exercising and sat quietly on a bench for 20 minutes, while others formally cooled down with 12 minutes of jogging and 8 minutes of stretching. It turned out that there were almost no differences between the two groups of players in terms of muscle soreness. This means that the available data strongly suggests that a cool-down does not reduce postexercise soreness. Given all of these findings, then, is there any valid reason to cool down? There is. A cool-down has been shown to prevent venous pooling after exercise (or the build up of blood in the veins). During prolonged, vigorous exercise, the blood vessels in your legs expand, meaning that more blood moves through them. Stop exercising abruptly, and that blood pools in your lower body, which can lead to dizziness. The condition is easy to combat, though. Just walking for a few minutes at the end of a workout and you’ll maintain normal circulation to the brain. And that’s not really a cool-down as most of us would define the procedure. So simply walking to your car after a class would allow you to reduce the venous pooling whilst restoring a sense of normality to your legs. Hence the reason I dont worry too much about cooling my clients down after their session. But what about stretching I hear you ask? We need to stretch dont we? My answer? No. No you dont. But my explanation for that I will save for another post!!
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 13:17:00 +0000
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