Sport injuries happen very often. It happens because you overload your body, but also because of the wrong training schedule or materials. Luckily there are ways to prevent a sports injury.
Why is a warming up important?
If you do a good warm-up before your workout, your blood circulation is quicker. This ensures that your muscles are ready for the intensity of your exercises. Your muscles need two thing to function properly: oxygen and nutrients. If you suddenly start exercising with a high intensity than the supply of these two products to your muscles still has to be started. By doing a warming up you ensure that there is a gradual influx of oxygen and nutrients.
Sudden activity without a warm-up requires your heart to work hard to deliver these nutrients to your muscles, causing blood pressure to rise. Now this is not a problem for some people, but if you already have high blood pressure, it is good to take this into account.
After your warm-up, your muscles are prepared and there is a constant flow of oxygen and nutrients. Your muscles and joints therefore have a greater range of motion. This reduces the risk of damage to muscles, tendons and ligaments. The joints themselves are lubricated by the warm-up, making it easier to move. From those first movements, your brain receives a signal that it sends energy-generating hormones into the body that prepare you for the workout.
Fact or myth
Fact
Starting training immediately and cancelling the entire warm-up does not seem wise to scientists. They think that stretching is negative for the body, but a dynamic warm-up generally prevents injuries. Research has shown that a dynamic warm-up helps improve your sports performance. So always warm up your body with low intensity (dynamic) exercises and don’t do stretch exercises at the beginning of your training.
Myth
Many people start their workout with stretching exercises. It would reduce the risk of injury and performance would be improved because the muscles would deliver more force after stretching. Years later, this premise turns out to be wrong: scientists have found no convincing evidence that stretching prevents the risk of injury. Nor is it true that a muscle performs better after being stretched. It turns out that it takes at least fifteen minutes before the muscle can make its normal effort after stretching. In fact, scientists believe that stretching sometimes does more harm than good.
The importance of a cooling down.
A cooling down is also important, because the body must be prepared for a rest period. By not doing a proper cool-down, the muscle soreness after working out can worsen because the waste products that are released during exercise are not properly drained.