Warming Up is Important

Warming Up is Important

How Important Is Warming Up?

Everyone wants to make progress, but sometimes injury can haunt us and not allow us to make progress and instead send us backwards. 

The good news is the majority of injuries can be prevented from occurring. How may you ask? By preparing properly for all your workouts carefully and correctly:

This means warming up and cooling down before putting your joints and muscles under the stresses of heavy resistance. Unfortunately these two processes are very often done incorrectly, un-substantially and sometimes not done at all.

Cooling Down Will Do All These Wonderful Things & More:

Lengthen Muscles:

When you stretching your muscles, they have to adapt to what you are doing to them. They do this by lengthening themselves. These will in turn, beat the muscles up fairly good- but this is what working out is about.

Destroying your muscles and then letting they heal to grow bigger and stronger. Muscles will protect themselves by contracting and bunching up once you have stopped destroying them, this will shorten the muscle.

Eventually it will stretch back to a good length once it is repaired, but this will still leave it shorter than it was before. In order to keep your muscle length, you must stretch!

Reduces Muscle Stiffness:

When you work the muscles they use up oxygen and produce carbon dioxide and lactic acid: These waste products are all taken away by your blood, but when you stop exercising, any waste left in the muscle will not be removed as fast.

As your time goes on, the waste products will make your muscles stiff when they eventually cool down.

If you can remove all possibly waste products that you physically can before the muscles cool down, then they will be less stiff afterwards. All you can do is to get rid of the waste the best you can, by cooling down.

You will never remove all the waste, but you can help remove a large portion by doing this.

Increases Your Flexibility:

By exercising joints they will disperse waste products and improve mobility. Ligaments and joints do not have a good access to a blood supply so any waste products that enter, will stay for an elongated amount of time. But they do not collect as much waste so it's ok.

Recovery Supplement:

There are so many supplements in the world today that its very easy to become confused on what to buy, and you may even buy into the ad campaign of the product rather than the actual product itself. Well I am here to list the recovery products that I use, in order of in importance.

Whey:

Whey is always a must in recovery, before you even touch any other canister, bottle, or jar you should always turn to your best friend- protein. Protein will never turn its back on you, it will always give itself fully, and to help you build your muscle promotes great growth.

I use Optimum Nutrition Whey simply for the fact that it is cheap, great tasting, and it's given me great results.

I have tried numerous whey products but they never lasted the test of time, because a frothy chocolate shake is always welcome anytime of the day, but you can easily grow tired of lemonade, berry, and all that other fruity stuff.

Multivitamin:

Let’s face it people. Due to poor agricultural farming, over production, pesticide infestation, and many other horrible things- we can never all get the vitamins we need from our food nowadays. Eating all our wheaties, vegetables, and milk just won't cut it anymore. We need a reliable source of vitamins and multivitamins are our answers.

"A good vitamin/mineral supplement is like a cop for your muscles. You don't always need cops. But when you do need them, boy, are you glad they're here. Same with vitamins and minerals: If you eat well, you might not always need a vitamin/mineral supplement. But there will be times when you do."

Glutamine:

Glutamine is basically a product which will reduce muscle atrophy when cutting, or help grow muscle when bulking. It is a great product which many bodybuilders and other athletes swear by, it helps in protein metabolism and also is stored deep within our muscle cells, so be sure to refill on your glutamine.