To get the most out of your training, proper warmup is key. In this episode, Wahoo sports scientists Dr. Jinger Gottschall and Mac Cassin share some tips on how to get primed to crush your next workout or event.
You can't put the pedal to the metal unless your engine is warmed up. The same is true with your body. To get the most out of your training, proper warmup is key. In this episode, Wahoo sports scientists Dr. Jinger Gottschall and Mac Cassin get fired up and dig into why warmup is so important to performance. They'll also share some tips on how to get primed to crush your next workout or event.
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Mac Cassin 0:00
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Knowledge Podcast brought to you by the Wahoo sports science team here in Boulder, Colorado. I'm Matt Cassin senior sports scientist.
Jinger Gottschall 0:07
And I'm Dr. Ginger Gottschall, Director of applied research.
Mac Cassin 0:11
Today we're discussing the importance of revving up your engine before starting a training session, race, or event.
Jinger Gottschall 0:16
All right, so with that, Mack, what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word warm-up?
Mac Cassin 0:21
For me, what comes to mind is hot pants.
Jinger Gottschall 0:24
Hot pants!
Mac Cassin 0:25
So this all kicked off back in London in 2012. For the Olympics, the great British track cycling team busted out these electrically heated pants for all their sprinters. So while they were waiting before their races, they put on these pants and kept their legs nice and warmed up.
Jinger Gottschall 0:40
That sounds like a fantastic idea. And because something I wouldn't actually mind having in winter, so Did it help?
Mac Cassin 0:47
Well, they did win pretty much everything on the track. So at least we can say it didn't hurt.
Jinger Gottschall 0:51
Okay, that's brilliant, then and we'll actually be chatting about some reasons why they might have been beneficial. And for me, I'm going to say my latest thing these days is high-intensity interval training. And if I don't warm up, and it doesn't need to belong, I call these accelerated warm-ups. They're anywhere from about three to five minutes, and then pump up the short intervals on the indoor trainer. But it is absolutely critical in terms of how I feel for the ride, how well I perform with respect to getting my heart rate towards the max, it's something you definitely don't want to neglect or forget about.
Mac Cassin 1:29
Absolutely. I think one of the key things I learned early on is no matter what sort of efforts are coming up for the day, you need to ease into it,
Jinger Gottschall 1:36
You absolutely do. And cyclists use warm-up regardless of the discipline. So road cycling, gravel trail track, whether it's a sprint event, or it's an endurance event, is an absolutely critical component for success, and people know it. And you, therefore, you see if you're watching TV, and you're watching a stage race, any of the tours, you'll see the riders on trainers on kickers, in fact, right before the race, just making sure that they are ready to dominate.
Mac Cassin 2:06
You used to just see that with the time trial stages when everyone's going off one at a time. But even today, when there's a when people know it's gonna be a hard start from the finish. Even if they've got a five-hour race up ahead, they'll spend 30 minutes before it even starts writing doing some efforts getting as we say getting the legs opened up,
Jinger Gottschall 2:21
Getting the legs opened up. And what this really means is we want to raise body temperature. And it's also a way to preserve some of your anaerobic energy as well as prime the nervous system. And what this does in terms of benefits is it minimizes heart stress, it can reduce your future muscle soreness, which anybody would love to do, as well as reduce your injury risk. So the mechanisms behind this are what we're going to chat about today. But don't forget about those important benefits, in addition to just prepping you mentally for the event.
Mac Cassin 2:55
Yeah, I think when I first was getting more into the physiology side of things, it was a no-duh moment, when I realized that a warm-up the thing you're trying to do that the reason it works mostly is increasing the temperature of your muscles. Quite literally, you're quite literally warming up this topic that's fascinating to me, because you just get into all these nice little details, little tricks that your body has to help it perform better.
Jinger Gottschall 3:16
Exactly. And these warm-ups are specific to what you're doing in the future. So it will depend upon the duration, the intensity, the current conditions. But in general, you just want to perform the same type of exercise that you're going to in that future session or race at a slower pace. And in addition, they have found some interesting details that it should be a little bit more full body. So think about even if you're cycling, how to also warm up that area of the shoulder to the hip, as well as just the legs.
Mac Cassin 3:49
Yes, I'm off the bike. Before you start writing exercises definitely became a part of my routine when I was getting Ultra serious about it and just 15 minutes of some band work. And then hopping on the trainer, you feel better you feel looser, like right from the get-go, which is always nice,
Jinger Gottschall 4:03
Helps with posture helps with core activation. So get it all going. So how about getting into the real sports science of this, folks?
Mac Cassin 4:12
Let's do it.
Jinger Gottschall 4:12
Let's do it. Just recall we've got a temperature, we've got metabolic neural control. And then we're also going to talk about the psychology aspect. But we're going to start with temperature and this is the longest one for us to get through. So bear with us, we're going to give you six reasons how the temperature actually helps you improve your future performance, to begin with, the temperature is so important because there's actually a very strong association between power output and muscle temperature, where when you have a single Celsius degree increase in muscle temperature, you can actually improve your exercise performance by two to 5%. And that's if you're looking at the power which is going to translate into speed. So pretty good stat one degree Celsius can equal a two to 5% increase in performance So give us a reason why Mac this is happening.
Mac Cassin 5:02
So one of the reasons is down to what we call vasodilation. So the opening up of the blood vessels in your legs, we've touched on this idea in some of our previous podcasts, but essentially, your muscles need the oxygen from your lungs, so they need oxygen from your blood. So your body shifts more of that blood to your working muscles. And specifically, when you talk about the heat aspect, that thermal aspect of this is actually releases red blood cell-derived ATP, which you don't need to remember the exact term there. But essentially, it's a very potent vasodilator.
Jinger Gottschall 5:35
That is critical and actually will also help with just the reduction in stress at your heart, which is important in terms of cardiovascular health. And this is one of the reasons why you see some cardiac events and heart attacks that happen even later on in a race. But it's because you didn't actually reduce that stress on the heart initially. And this leads directly into the second of six of these specific heat mechanisms, which is you're increasing the oxygen delivery, you're getting an improved transfer of that oxygen from the blood to the muscle.
Mac Cassin 6:10
Yeah, this is called the oxygen dissociation curve. And this was so hard for me to wrap my mind around in physiology when we were learning about it in school because there are things that happen like the increasing temperature as your blood becomes more acidic. As the temperature changes, as there's more co2 buildup, there's a shift where your red blood cells don't want to hold on to the oxygen as well. And so that was what's like, Well, why does that? Why is that a good thing? And it's because then the hemoglobin in your blood is then going to transfer it to myoglobin when you know what's in your muscles when it pulls the oxygen in. So it's its sigmoidal curve, just Google.
Jinger Gottschall 6:47
Just total nerd out on this oxygen hemoglobin dissociation curve. It is really cool and cool to understand the benefit is just taking it from the blood into the muscle. What happens at the muscle fiber level, though?
Mac Cassin 7:00
Yeah, so one of the things is you get just increased performance from your muscle fibers with type one fibers, you can get greater use of phosphocreatine when you're doing lower cadence work with that increased temperature and greater utilization of your type two fibers at higher cadences, which and those are the really powerful ones. And we know that generally, most people hit their peak sprint power around 130 rpm. And that is why sprinters need quite a long warm-up, it's why the GB track team decided to have hot pants so that between riding on the rollers and then waiting for their start time, which could be five up to 10 minutes, you can lose like we said one degree can be two to 5%. So you can lose one degree pretty easily. So just throw on some hot pants, and you don't need to worry about losing that benefit, right
Jinger Gottschall 7:47
the muscle fibers are performing at their max, there's another thing happening at the muscle level that is beneficial, which is that when you have this temperature increase, you're actually getting anaerobic glycolysis and mussel glycogen, Allah says that leads to increased power production. So there seems to be this relationship between an increase in temperature and how these cross bridges, which is what's going on during contraction at the molecular level, can help you increase force production. And the data actually shows this can happen specifically during the power portion of the pedal stroke. So from the top down to the bottom, you're seeing with the increased temperature at the muscle level that the power specifically dominates at this point in the cycle, which is where you want it to be. So we've talked about the muscle. How about talking about any soreness and or where the muscle connects at the tendon level.
Mac Cassin 8:44
I think everyone listening has experienced Dom's or delayed onset muscle soreness at some point and can make a set of stairs very daunting. But essentially, when you have an increase in temperature, your, for lack of a better term, your muscles, and tendons get a bit looser, they literally become more extensible. They are more malleable, they can move easier. And I think most people have also experienced the opposite of that when it's really cold. And you think wow, I'm really stiff. My joints feel stiff. It's because they are physically they're not as you're not as bendy when it's that cold. And so because of that increased sort of extensibility less damage from eccentric contractions which you don't normally experience on the bike. You can on a fixed gear if you're pedaling really fast, but generally speaking, you're going to get fewer tendon and ligament strains when you're properly warmed up. So before diving into something and that becomes especially true if you are writing in the cold outside. 20 warmers are a cyclist best friend because you don't want those ligaments in your knees, ligaments tendons in your knees to be overly stiff because it's
Jinger Gottschall 9:46
exactly. So now we have five reasons in terms of how temperature makes a difference. And we've talked about it from the blood into the muscle into the tendon and the last one is simply just relating them all together in how you get peak power output and peak relaxation rate. So all these things are basically working in parallel and in concert, and the whole system is working better when you have an increase in temperature,
Mac Cassin 10:15
which I think is just a really cool design feature of the human body. Because when you were quite inefficient when it comes to turning energy into movement, so essentially 75% of the energy you use or is actually going to heat production, only 25% makes it to your movement. And so if you're pedaling at 250 Watts, your body is actually producing 750 watts of heat, which is the same as the average toaster,
Jinger Gottschall 10:38
that is hot, that is hot to get it. Alright, so we have just gotten through the meat of this, the main benefit, in terms of a warm-up are these six mechanisms that improve when you increase your overall body temperature, we're just gonna touch on three more very quickly. And the first one is metabolic.
Mac Cassin 11:00
Yeah, so when we talk about metabolic here, one of the things is really the, you're elevated the co2, so you're increasing your resting oxygen consumption rate. And that's going to have an impact of sparing some anaerobic restores. When you start doing subsequent bounce when you start your race, you start your training, so you preserve a little bit more energy, you keep something in the tank for when you need it more.
Jinger Gottschall 11:22
Exactly. It's also improving your exercise tolerance. And once again, this is going to lead to what we've talked about before, which is your main power output. The next one is neural one of my absolute favorites. So we'll just give you a one-phrase summary, this phrase I love, it's called post activation potentiation. What that means is, after you warm up after that, you're actually getting an enhanced central output, or signal to the motor neurons. So that's what's going to fire up your muscle's increased reflex activity. So that's another cool one, if you warm-up, you're going to be much quicker to react, your reaction time decreases. And you're also getting this phosphorylation of the myosin regulatory light chains, which is going to lead to greater output off. So that's some of the nerdy stuff. But just remember this post-activation potentiation sounds sexy, say it like that. Oh, and let's finish though with something that is really helpful, which is just getting your mind ready for that game. So we're talking here about the psychological mechanism? Yeah, so
Mac Cassin 12:28
for a lot of people, a warm-up becomes a really regimented routine that they can go through, and you have complete control of it. And it just helps you get in the mindset. So doing stuff like visualization, if you've got keywords, there are all these factors going on that have been shown when you are able to get in the zone with a warm-up, you're gonna have reduced RPE, which means you can either ride at the same power for longer or right at higher power for a given duration, which pretty
Jinger Gottschall 12:58
take either one, I will totally take either one. So it's just, it's really prepping you it's giving you that focus time. It's also what they call preparatory arousal. It's just getting you psyched up.
Mac Cassin 13:11
Yeah, I had for a number of years, I think three years running, I had this same set 25-minute playlist, that every time trial I would do, I'd listen to that and do these days with one of those songs comes on my Spotify, it just some snap, you're like, it's showtime time to go.
Jinger Gottschall 13:28
Bring it on. So it almost becomes superstitious, I think, for a lot of athletes where they want to perform that same routine to the absolute second, whether that's with music, or movement, or combo, what they're thinking about where they are, what they're on, etc, to make sure they're really dialed in psychologically, which is great advice for you to come up with a routine that really starts to motivate you and put you into that zone.
Mac Cassin 13:57
It can be a double-edged sword, though, if something does go a little bit wrong. I've seen some people kind of unravel if their warm-up isn't 100%. Perfect. And I was one of those people at one point. Yes.
Jinger Gottschall 14:08
So you do you have to be ready for the unknown. No doubt about it. But what we hope that has happened today for you is that you will now have so much information that you will never skip a warm-up. It's way too important and has way too many benefits for you to neglect it. And we may even have something that may motivate you to warm up.
Mac Cassin 14:32
Yeah, we've got a number of warm-ups in the walking system app now. So you can if you need a longer warm-up if you need a different kind of effort. It's unfortunate there isn't a golden perfection, ultimate warm-up. That's good for everyone. Every time for every workout, you need to experiment a bit you need to figure out what works for you. I pretty much have a set warm-up That'll do for 95% of the workouts I do does happen to be one of the new warm-ups so Yeah, just figure out what works for you. Don't be afraid to try something new but definitely make sure you warm up,
Jinger Gottschall 15:07
warm it up. We want to increase the muscle temperature, preserve some anaerobic energy prime the nervous system, and what this will lead to is reduced cardiac stress. It will lessen your muscle soreness and reduce injury risk in addition to just getting you totally psyched out. Keep on moving on, warm it up.
Mac Cassin 15:28
That's it for another episode of the knowledge podcast. We hope you now can go away and wow your friends with your awesome new physiology Facts. Until next time, this has been the knowledge podcast by Waho