Warm-up is one or a series of exercises to prepare yourself for sport practice or fitness exercises.

Warm-up helps reduce the risk of injury, muscle soreness during and after exercise. Please read the tips below for better understanding!

The irreplaceably important role of warm-up

The name purpose of warm-up exercises is to increase your heart rate. It has two benefits: firstly, gradually increasing the temperature of the main body parts; and secondly, bringing more blood circulation to the muscles. In general, it prepares the body for movement, ready for more vigorous exercises.

When your muscles are warming up, your circulatory system pumps more oxygen-rich blood to the muscles. In addition, warm-up will avoid sudden increase of blood circulation throughout the body. 

The muscles area that need to be warmed up 

When you warm up, you should focus on large muscle groups on your body, starting with the quadriceps with in-place running, waist turning. You turn upper body, raise your hands and to warm up your chest and shoulder. For those who like running on treadmill or jumping rope, you can walk briskly for 3 to 5 minutes or stretch your legs. 

Does warm-up take a lot of time?

It usually takes 5 minutes for the body to gain awareness of how much blood needed to move to the muscles. Warm-up should happen continuously from 5 to 10 minutes, feeling a little sweat is the most idea.

Warm-up consists of 2 parts:

General warm-up: the purpose is to encourage and wake up your body, balance the functional state of internal organs with moving parts, maximizing the physical capacity of the body. General warm-up slowly heats up the muscles (by using simple exercises: circle the arm, twist your body, leg, whole body, light running and jumping, etc.); make the joints more fluid and flexible (rotating the joint: wrist, angle, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow, neck, etc.), finishing with muscle stretches.

Specific warm-up: is designed to help the body adapt to the intensity of professional exercises and characteristics of different sports, including movements with different amplitude, intensity, rhythmic natures that are similar to the movements in exercise and competition. 

Warm-up will help you best prepare both mentally and physically to perform the exercises that follow. Above all, it limits the risks of injury during practice. The best way to warm-up is to follow the sequence, increasing the spend and intensity while exercising. If you are fully aware of the role of the warm-up, you never should “ignore” this part in your exercise routine!           

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