There Is A Method to the Madness

Warm Up Right, Cool Down Smart

• Rob Maxwell, M.A.

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Welcome to There Is a Method to the Madness. My name is Rob Maxwell, and I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I am the owner of Maxwell's fitness programs, and I've been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really works and most importantly why things work. Hence the name There is a Method to the Madness. Before I get to today's show, I want to thank Jonathan and Lynn Gilden of the Gilden Group at Realty Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home sales. Why don't you give them a shout and figure out what your home is worth? 386-451-2412. Hello everybody and welcome to There Is a Method to the Madness. Again, I want to say, you know, the reason why I named it this, if this is the first time that you are tuning in, the reason why I named it a method to the madness is because it's a saying that I uh just started saying over and over and over when I first began as a personal trainer. Um if you don't know my history, so I um actually got my master's degree in exercise physiology before I started doing personal training. So I always had a bias towards science. So when I first started, and I would tell people things that might be a little counterintuitive to what they've been taught before, because unfortunately there's not a lot of great um, you know, licensing in my industry. There's a lot of misinformation that goes on out there. So when I would explain it and people look surprised, I'd say, well, you know what? There is a method to the madness. And then I would explain it to them. I would, you know, give them the science, and then they would get it. So said it for so many years. I said, you know what? That's what I titled my first book, and uh that's why I titled a podcast. So that's why. And that's what I like to talk about. We're gonna talk about like the science and why we do things. And uh today I'm gonna cover warm-up and cool down. I mean, we hear it all the time, and I guarantee you, why don't you do this with your friends just for the fun of it? Do like a uh, you know, a 10-person poll and say, hey, you know, why do you warm up and what's the best way? And they're gonna say, oh, well, you know, it's to get you going and, you know, to get you moving, to get things going around, you know, which, you know, isn't not true, but there is more to it. But then the bigger thing is they're gonna say, How? Oh, you're supposed to stretch. Well, no, you're not supposed to stretch to warm up. So stretching is not a warm-up. And then do the same pool with pull, or you can go pull. So I'm already thinking pool because of blood pooling with the cool down. You can see how our brain jumps ahead a little bit. So, and I'll explain that in two seconds. But if you ask people the same thing about a cool down, they'll go, oh, well, you know, you're you're just supposed to, you know, get back to normal. I don't even know what they'll say on that one. And the then they'll say how to do it. They don't know. I mean, maybe, I don't know. I think people might know more how to cool down. They might know less why they do it, but they might know more how to cool down versus how to warm up. So maybe give them the benefit of the doubt. They'll say, well, get back on the bike or do some stretching, which actually would be true. But let's learn a little bit about the method to the madness. Okay, first off, why do we warm up? Because when we warm up, we are making our muscles more elastic. So our muscles are actually elastic. Okay, they're not plastic, they're elastic. So when they get warmed up, they get a little more, actually, a lot more pliable. All right, they're less likely to pull when muscles are cold per se or not warmed up, they're far more likely to get pulled, like a pulled muscle, tear a muscle. A lot of times you'll say, Oh, somebody got hurt because they weren't warmed up. A lot of truth to that. So, what happens is let's say that they're uh, you know, well, kids can get away with it because kids have a lot more natural elasticity in their muscles. Adults, we tend not to as we get older. But let's say uh, you know, a 20-something year old decides to race his friend across a parking lot like 20-year-olds still have a tendency to do. I mean, I can remember doing stupid stuff like that in college, you know, and you're not warmed up. All of a sudden you pull your hamstring, you pull your quad. Well, you're not warmed up. Should we have stretched ahead of time? No, because stretching a muscle, a cold muscle, is what? It's pulling the muscle fibers that are already cold and rigid. So it's the worst time to stretch, okay? So we want to warm up because it increases the blood flow to the muscles, it increases the elasticity of the muscles, it makes us more likely to be focused when we warm up, and it makes your body more resilient to getting pulled. Now, how do we warm up? Think about the term warm up doesn't just mean move, it means raise your core temperature. That's what we're actually trying to do to raise the core temperature. You're trying to raise the core temperature. I know I said that a few times for emphasis. So if it's cold out, you need to warm up more. If it's hot out, you need to warm up less. It's really all about raising the core temperature. So if you're going to say a 5K or you're starting your cardio workout and it's 90 degrees outside, I don't know why you'd be starting them, but some people do. Even if you're starting at 75 degrees, 78 degrees in the summertime and you get out by 5 a.m. like you should, you don't have to warm up as much because your core temperature's already raised. You should warm up some five minutes. Now, if it's a cold day and you're out there and you're doing your 5k run or you're doing your walk or you're doing your cardio outside and it's 45 degrees. Well, you probably should warm up for closer to 15 minutes because simply that's how long it's going to take. Now, how do you know when you're warmed up? Very simple, when you start breaking a sweat. When you start breaking a sweat, you are warmed up. Your muscles are more elastic. It means you have raised your core temperature. So we can use guidelines like five to 15 minutes is a pretty darn good guideline, but we can also just know what's going on in the body because your body is going to perspire once you have raised your core temperature up over its normal 98.6 or whatever you happen to be, then you know you're warmed up. How do we do it? We do it by doing light cardio. We want to move. If you're running, walk first. If you're sprinting, jog first. If you're working out, get on an exercise bike or do some calisthenics, things like that that make you move. Like let's say you're doing your home workout, you don't have an exercise bike, do some bodyweight squats, do some toe touchers, like literally toe touchers, movement, not to the point of stretch, get on a treadmill, walk, whatever. Way to do cardio is light, or way to warm up is through light cardio. It's after you're warmed up that you should stretch. I'm a huge advocate of stretching after you're warmed up or after your workout, okay? And go to the point of sweating, which is good. Um, before I move the cooldown, I'll just like tell you a couple silly things that people do. And it's like the method to the madness just didn't reach home or whatever, but you'll see runners sometimes at races 5K's, 10ks, marathons even, and they're running like three miles ahead of time. They're saying, Well, what are you doing? Oh, I like to warm up before the race. It's like, okay, you're you're not warming up, you're running more. Probably, if anything, you're decreasing your performance. And I don't know, you know, the psychology side of me comes out and says, in a way, they're doing that on purpose. It's a little bit of self-handicapping. Let's say they don't run the time they want. They could say, Well, I did run three miles ahead of time, you know, I was a little tired. And, you know, naturally, if they have a good time, they flip it and say, Well, it's because I warmed up. You know, the human nature likes to protect its ego all the time. But we see it all the time, and we see it with cooldown too, with some of these runners. Let me tell you, you don't have to do that. You go to a 5K, whether you're an elite or an age group or somebody just trying to get through it. No judgment here. Anybody out there's a winner. You warm up to the point five to 15 minutes where you're breaking a sweat, light cardio. So for me, I run. I mean, I've run for a really long time. I don't typically run to warm up at a 5K. I walk fast. I might jog a little. I understand what a warm-up is, so I make sure I warm up. I'm not trying to add on cardio. I can keep going on that because I believe there's other reasons people do that too. Which leads me in the cooldown. And you will see some of these same runners doing the same thing. They will finish a race and they'll say, I'm gonna go warm down or cool down a couple miles. It's like, mm, okay. So clearly, you don't know really what a warm down or cool down is, and what are they doing again? They're just adding on miles, which could be okay. Like if it's in their training plan to do more endurance that day, that's fine. But just call it what it is. It's that, it's not a warm down. So warm down is the opposite of a warm-up. You want to bring your body back to homeostasis. You're trying to return the system back to baseline. That's what you're trying to do. Now you're never gonna get it fully there for uh it could be if you have a garment or an apple watch, they tell you you like might not be fully recovered for 24 hours, or maybe it even says 36 hours if you really, really pushed it. I mean, those things aren't 100% accurate, but they give you an idea. But the point of a cool down or a warm down, call it what you want, is to return your body to homeostasis. That means let the heart rate begin to come back down to normal. So if you got it up to 150 during your run, your weights, whatever you're doing, you want to bring it close to what it would be at resting or where you started. Typically, if you've worked with any kind of intensity, you're only gonna get within, say, 10 beats of where you started because again, you're not going to reach complete warm down, you're not gonna reach complete homeostasis. In the exercise world, we call this epoch, excess post-oxygen consumption. So when the body is going into immediate repair, that costs energy. And anytime it costs the body energy, it's going to elevate heart rate, respiration rate, and all those things. So, therefore, you're going to see a 10-beat increase from where the baseline was. But your idea is to try to get it there. Like, don't just stop. Now, it's not true you're gonna give yourself a heart attack. I mean, in most, most, most, most cases, it's just that you're not going to recover as well if you don't do a cool down. Now, you do want to try to prevent venous pooling. So if you've been doing a lot on your legs, let's say you've been running or you've been doing a lower body strength workout or you've been cycling, most of the blood flow is in your lower body. Now, your heart rate pumps blood up vertically. Now, something you may not know, but we call the soleus muscles, which are the deep muscles of your calves underneath your gastroc muscles, we call them the second heart, because what they actually do is pump blood back to the heart. So if you just stop after running and you've been working hard, you got a lot of blood flow in your lower body. So the blood is going to pool, might make you feel a little bit dizzy, and it's not as good for recovery. Because what was happening was as you're running or cycling or walking, whatever, the soleus muscle was pumping the blood back to the heart. You stop the soleus muscle, it's not contracting, the blood pulls. So we want to cool down to keep that going so we don't have the blood pooling until your body is basically getting closer to homeostasis. That's the whole point of a cool down. Now, how do you do it? The same way you started. Light cardio. You finish a race and or a 5K or whatever you're doing, or you run. I mean, it's not the time to add on with less intense miles. It's the time to cool down by maybe doing some easy walking, some jogging. Most, you know, most intense should be a jog for almost anybody, if that's the idea of cooling down. And then the intensity should be wearing off as you get closer to the end on that. Another way you can do that is some stretching as well. You know, walk around a little bit, do some cardio, and then stretch the muscles because that's when they're really going to get the most benefit of your flexibility training is after the workout when everything is really, really warmed up and the muscles are as elastic as possible. I always finish my workouts with stretching. Always. I enjoy it, I like it. I'll do some light cardio, then into the stretching, and it doesn't have to be very long. Again, think five to 15 minutes. If you've, you know, if if your workout was brief and not overly intense, the cooldown can be just as brief and not overly intense. Well, it shouldn't be intense at all. It shouldn't be long at all. Like you literally can get away with just a couple of minutes. If it's been a pretty good, like for me, if I've pushed myself doing a three-mile run or a three-point mile run or something like that, I'm probably gonna spend a good 10 or 15 minutes of walking to bring everything back to normal. I usually just walk the course backwards if I'm doing a race. So that is the method to the madness. I hope this really helps. It helped me. I like talking about these things. So uh until next time, B Max Fit and B Max Well. All right, thank you everybody for listening to today's show. I really appreciate it. I want to remind you to please hit automatic download. It really helps me and it helps the show. And now I'd like to thank Overhead Door of Daytona Beach, the area's premier garage door company. They have the best product and the best service. I personally vouch for Jeff and Zach Hawk, the owners. They are great. They're going to get you exactly what you need. So if you have any garage door needs, give them a shout at 386-222-3165. And now I'm very excited to add another sponsor. ProCharge Liquid Protein Enhancer has joined the team. And let me tell you, they are a great product. I pop one after a workout. Each container has 40 grams of protein, so that's two servings. I take 20 grams after I work out. What's really cool about them is it's portable. You can throw them in your suitcase. You don't have to worry about mixing powders and making a mess. At least that's an issue I've had with some of the protein powders through the years. And you know what? They taste really, really good. So you can check them out on my website, fittothemax.net, or you can go right to them at prochargeprotein.com.

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