The Runner's Warm-Up: Three Phases and Common Mistakes

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement podcast, where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. Hey everybody, it's your co-host Sebastian with the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the show. Over the next few episodes, we're going to do some special topics or some research updates that we periodically do here at Performance Place to make sure that our virtual telehealth sessions and our in-person ones are the most efficient they can possibly be when we're working with people with knee conditions and hips and low backs and feet and so on.

Now, I can tell you right now that I was actually surprised by some of the findings in these research papers from the Journalist Strength and Conditioning, so I'm going to give you some of the updates and bullet points as I find them. If you guys ever want to work with us, we do have virtual and consultation options, and you just need to call us at 714-502-4243 or email us info at p2sportscare.com. Let's get into the show. In the podcast today, we're going to cover an older research paper that's been around since 2010. I know that seems maybe 15 years old at this point, but it is a very valid one.

It's called The Effects of Warming Up on Physical Performance, a Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis. Now, for those of you out there who are not familiar with levels of research, systematic review and meta-analysis are both very good, and this one is, we have both of them in here. So, this is more than just a sample size of one. This covers many different studies, and they screen out to make sure that they're not too biased and so on. So, I thought I would give some general points today of the takeaways that they found out with this paper, which reviewed many papers. Now, the main idea is that this study reviewed for the existence of research to see if warming up before sports or physical activity actually improved performance.

We're not even talking about injury prevention in this, but injury prevention, I think, is a big part as well. So, you need to make sure that you do warm up to prevent injuries to start in the first place. But overall, I found that warming up usually helps, but the type of warm up actually matters a lot. The key points we're going to cover today is, number one, warming up generally improves performance. Most studies found that 70, sorry, most studies, 79% showed that warming up led to better results in various sports like running, jumping, and even golf. Second bullet point, the type of warm up is critical.

Some warm ups didn't help or even hurt performance. This often happened when warm up wasn't specific to the activity or wasn't done correctly. For example, too short, too intense, or followed by too long of a rest. And don't worry, we're going to get into all of these a little bit more in detail as we go through the podcast today. Other factors that play a role is things like the person's age, fitness level, gender, and even their mindset can affect how warm up helps. In simpler terms, basically warming up is usually a good idea for improving your sport performance, but just doing any old warm up may not cut it.

You may actually have to find the right kind of warm up, which shouldn't be too hard or too long. Now, as we get into bullet point one, how warm ups generally improve performance, I like to break this into three phases. The first phase being light aerobic warm up, which is about five to ten minutes. The second is dynamic stretching, which is about, again, five to ten minutes. And then if we're talking about runners, we have runner-specific drills. If we have other types of sports, I think there would be sporting-specific drills or skill-specific drills. And I'll cover that a little bit as we get into this today.

But I'm going to cover this more in the light of endurance athletes today, but just know that this can carry over for other types of sports as well. So the first phase, light aerobic activity, this may include something like light jogging, brisk walking, cycling, with some easy resistance, even some basic range of motion drills like arm circles or leg swings. I know a lot of people put their arm up against a fence and just swing the leg back and forth. And some of the critics may say, well, this doesn't really do anything. You know, it's not really hard enough for the warmup. But yeah, but it's a basic starting point.

So the physiological reasons for doing something more as a light aerobic is going to be gradually increasing your metabolic rate or blood flow, which delivers more oxygen and nutrients to your muscles. It also raises heart rate. So you're preparing for a cardiovascular event, such as a run. It also increases muscle temperature, which improves flexibility and reduces chance of injury. Now, I'm sure a lot of the aging runner population out there has learned at this point that you can't just get out there and just start doing it. Like you need to take a little time to warm up and they call it a warmup because you're warming things up.

I think the most general terms that I use to give people for a warmup is it should produce some form of warming up. Like you should have to take a jacket off. You should feel like you're starting to create a little bit of sweat going on, especially if it's if you're in a hot area, but you should warm up. It's like warming up your car. If you don't do this, you really can't start revving it higher. OK, phase two, dynamic stretching, five to 10 minutes. Specific drills that you could do as a runner would be leg swings, which is forward, backwards or side to side. You put your arm up against a fence or a wall and you swing it up and down and so on.

I like to actually include a little bit of core stability with this, meaning it shouldn't be like you're the weight of your swinging leg deforms your torso. So you could create a little bit of pressure into the wall, which creates torso stiffness, which helps out with improving core stability as well as just hip mobility and flexibility. Now, this dynamic stretching, for those of you who don't know, it's kind of the opposite brother of static stretching. So static stretching is the ones that people have used a long, long time ago where they kind of sit into a stretch for a long period of time.

An example of this would if you look around with your other runners, you're going to find people finding curbs and they're going to be dropping their heel off of a curb. This is a static stretch. Now, there is merit to doing some static stretching, but at least we're talking about an actual warm up. We want to do a little bit more dynamic. Even something like arm circles. I'm sure that you guys know that your arm is incorporated in your run as well. So arm circles, forward, backwards, side to side, like the little yo-hos, like Captain Cook is okay too. This loosens the shoulder joints and improves upper body mobility.

A fact that's not really known too much is that arm overhead activity, such as hanging or even the arm circles, encourages more mid-back mobility. And so if you look at someone doing arm circles, it's hard to really do it when you're in a rounded, hunched over position. Now, when I look at a lot of runners that I see of recreational runners, I do see a lot of them with some mid-back stiffness, which is unfortunate because the mid-back is an area that rotates a lot, and it tolerates some of the rotational forces in your run, which spares things like your lower back, and it also spares some of your hips and knees too.

So doing something like arm circles, although it may not seem like the most important thing, actually it is very useful for upper body or thoracic spine mobility. Some other drills that you could do on a laundry list through these, and I'll give the basic rundown of why. So high knees activates hip flexures, improves leg drive, butt kicks activates the hamstrings, improves leg turnover, walking lunges are really nice to improve hip and leg strength and flexibility, lateral shuffles, ankle rotations, and torso twists. Torso twists are more for core or spine mobility. And again, talking about that thoracic spine mobility is going to be important in your running as well.

Now, I remember I did a podcast a long time ago where I was interviewed and we had discussed what is the best way to stretch an adductor? And I said, squatting. And they said, no, no, no, really. What's the best way to stretch an adductor? And I said, squatting. And we boiled down into it a little bit more of why. Stretching the adductor or stretching parts of the leg, such as walking lunges and even doing squats in your warmups and your dynamic stretching can be helpful because you're using your antagonist muscles to help lengthen those tissues as well. For example, if you're going to stretch your hamstring, you could just contract your quad.

So doing a dynamic warmup encompasses big ranges of motion, ideally under some form of control. Like I mentioned with the leg swings, you don't want it just to be sloppy. And it'll start warming your body up as well. So the physiological reasons for doing a dynamic warmup or a dynamic stretch is it takes joints and muscles with their full range of motion, improving flexibility and range of motion overall for your run. It activates the nervous system as well. So remember how I said that you have to have it under control? So having active range of motion is better than someone else stretching you.

So if you have something like a partner stretch, not bad, but not the same thing. So activating the nervous system improves muscle coordination and it prepares you for running specific movements. And it also prepares the body for the dynamic movement of running. Now, phase three is going to be running specific drills. This would be about five minutes or so. And a lot of you are familiar with these. Some of you won't be. So there's short strides, gradually increasing pace. This prepares muscles for faster paces and improves running mechanics. Also, we have some types of skips. So light skips, A skips, B skips, and so on can be helpful for activating tissue and also improving stiffness or improving ground contact time.

Now, another podcast that I will cover to come are going to be based upon running economy as well as ground contact time. We know from a lot of research over the years that ground contact time, if too long, meaning that you're on the ground too long between strides or hopping, then you have a higher potential of getting injured. And so stiffness of the lower limb, especially the calf and the Achilles and the foot is important. And so you can use stuff like skipping drills or plyometrics to help out with that. Now, doing a whole plyometric drill or a program before running, probably not the best thing.

It'd probably provide some neurological, neuro-system fatigue. But doing some basic skips may not be a bad idea. So other things that are beneficial with your running-specific drills would be it mimics the movement of running and further activating tissues in the nervous system, like I said. Refines running mechanics and improve efficiency or economy, reducing the risk of injury. It specifically activates neural pathways to be used in the run, and it starts to gradually get you more to a running pace. Now, the second bullet point in this podcast is going to be how the type of warm-up is critical.

We mentioned that some warm-ups didn't help or actually hurt the performance. I'd say as a general rule at this point, if you're not warming up, just do something. I don't want you to be paralysis by analysis type of scenario. But I think if you follow the general guidelines that I spoke about in the last section, I think you'll be okay. But let's just cover some of the points that people fail on when they get a little bit more in tune with doing their warm-ups, because sometimes people think more is better. So the first mistake that people tend to make is they're doing vigorous activity before high-intensity running.

So this is supported by the idea of pre-fatigue, so you don't necessarily want to deplete your energy storage and cause muscle fatigue prior to doing your performance. Hey everyone, it's Sebastian. I'm going to hijack the show just for a second here to tell you about an opportunity that we have called the Discovery Session. A lot of people over the years have reached out to us from our YouTube channel, because we have 150,000 YouTube subscribers at this point in time, probably more by the time you're listening to this. And we have a lot of people listen to this show and read our articles online.

They're frustrated. People are frustrated about not being able to get back to full activity. They're frustrated they can't really trust their body. They're frustrated that they have not found any long-term answers or things to make them happy. And so we're here to help. We may not be the ones to actually help you, and we're okay with that, but we're hoping that if you are able to speak with us, that we can maybe give you some insight of things that you potentially haven't tried yet. And if we know people, we'll suggest those people too. So if you want to take advantage of the Discovery Session, all you need to do is go to p2sportscare.com and find the Book Now button.

It's all in there. We have virtual or in-person options. You can go to the show notes for this show and find a link that will directly connect you to us, or you can call us 714-502-4243. We'd love to help you the best that we can, and we're always here to serve. Now back to the show. So as a whole, making your warm-up way too intense can be a problem with making your run is going to be worse. Like your body's going to be tanked just from your warm-up. Now, in contrast, though, and this happens a lot with people who are recreational athletes. I see it with recreational athletes of various different types is they show up to the field or to their event, and they don't do a warm-up because they say that the warm-up is too much for their, it's too fatiguing.

Now, let's just consider what we talked about in the last bullet points, where 5 to 10 minutes of light aerobic, 5 to 10 minutes of dynamic stretching, 5 minutes of specific running drills, or if you're in a different sport, like taking ground balls if you're a baseball player or things like that, taking batting practice. Like if you're fatigued by these types of things, like I would consider this as more of an issue with general physical preparedness. Like you're not physically prepared to do the sport anyways. And so maybe part of your actual weekly routine, whether you're doing a run or not, is going to be going through your warm-up and getting better at your warm-up.

Well, the warm-up is important, but I don't want to mislead people and say that because you're tanked from your 5-minute warm-up, the warm-up is too much. If you follow those general guidelines that I mentioned earlier, that you shouldn't be tanked from your warm-up. Now, if you are tanked from your warm-up that I talked about earlier, then you may have a problem with general physical preparedness. In that case, get better at that, because that will actually help you in your runs as well. And the chance of injury will go way, way down. Now, the second mistake that I see people make is they do weighted warm-ups before their runs or before their physical activity.

And this is, they just tank their muscles. Their muscles are fatigued and their nervous system is fatigued. If you did heavy, heavy back squats or heavy deadlifting or something that's actually hard for you into the below 5 rep max type of range, like this is kind of a problem. Like this is just an issue with exercise programming structure. And so this is something you can do on other days, but you want to, you don't want to do it before your actual run. Now, the third mistake I see people make is they do all of their warm-up, which is a good warm-up, but they actually wait too long to actually do their run.

So they, they kind of mill around a little bit and they get the benefits of their good warm-up. They get increased muscle temperature, they get neural activation. But remember, this is, this starts to diminish. Like you can't just warm up now and then go run in an hour. You can't just warm up at your house and then run, drive for 30 minutes and then show up at the trail and run, run again and be okay. Like you have to do it before your run or before your event. So just make sure you're not taking long rest periods between, I would say, I don't really have any evidence to say how long is too long, but I'd say if you're waiting more than like 15 minutes, that's probably a little bit too long.

And maybe if that is the case, then you show just up, show up a little earlier to where you're going to go and just make sure that you do your warm-up there or make sure that your warm-up is, I don't want to say extended and kind of lollygagging, but we may not actually, like if you're with, if you're with a group and everybody's taking too long or somebody's light. So five to 10 minutes, light aerobic warm-up, five to 10 minutes of dynamic stretching, five minutes of specific running stretching or running drills rather. And then maybe you go back and you circle through a little bit. I don't think I would do more of the running specific drills.

I wouldn't do more skipping, but I would probably go back into more of the light aerobic warm-up style and just keep moving. I see a lot of people do this at traffic lights, which is great, or they'll do it like when someone, when they're waiting for somebody. And so that is the perfect thing to do. Just keep your body moving. Now, some other things that would be considered inappropriate warm-up, at least for running or distance running would be static stretching before sprinting. Now, there's, there's been a lot of debate over the years about static stretching, as I mentioned earlier. And first, a lot of people say it's not helpful and it can decrease explosiveness.

It can decrease vertical leap. It can decrease sprint times and so on. And it decrease the amount of stiffness in the tissue that you may need stiffness in your run. Now, I'm, I'm a fan of doing static stretching again, but I would, don't think I would do it before your actual, at least sprinting. It's debatable if you want to do it before your warrant long run. And I think that it would be, there's scenarios where potentially if you were not able to do your long run because of pain or discomfort, because you did not do your specific static stretching, this would be a different story. And everybody's a little bit different when you design programs for them.

So we just need to make sure that these generalities aren't pasted upon everybody, but this is, these are general patterns that we see. So I wouldn't do static stretching before sprinting or before faster work. Also, I wouldn't do sprint drills before a long, easy run. Now, the body of evidence that actually talks about warm-ups as being, lack of warm-ups being a problem associated injury risk. I, I, I think we all kind of know that by now, younger people tend to get away with not doing as much as a warm-up. If you guys have listened to other podcasts, you know that I play baseball. And so we have people who show up, you know, 10 minutes, 30 minutes before the game.

Traditionally, everybody shows up about an hour before the game and does a warm-up. And I can tell you with full certainty that an hour is almost not enough. And because you got to get batting in, you got to make sure you do some sprinting. You got to do all your dynamic warm-up. You have your cardiovascular or you, sorry, your aerobic buildup. And so there's, there's a lot of things that can go into your warm-up. So, and I know that people of younger ages, a lot of times they disregard this because they haven't really had any injuries yet. And so when you have your first injury, you, you may realize that warming up is actually pretty important.

And so as, as I say, if we're talking about not having time for a warm-up, because that does come up quite often as well. Like, like I want to play the full game, but I don't have time to warm up, you know, or I want to go on this longer run, but I don't have time to warm up because of other time constraints. I would just scale back a little bit. And I know that at least for football, if you guys have followed football, there's, there's Tom Brady. I think every person of every sport or every hobby knows who Tom Brady is. So Tom Brady is a football player who really did super well until he was 40, 40 years old.

And everyone's wondering, how's, how does Tom Brady do it? How does he keep playing at top level? Well, he takes care of his body all the time and he treats his body as an asset. And so he eats well, he trains well, he warms up, you know, says a lot of things that he will do. And so, as I tell most people, let's create realistic expectations. Like if you want to run 10 miles consistently, but you only have time for really eight miles and a 20 minute warmup, you're probably an eight mile runner. Okay. Until you develop a little bit more time or become more efficient to other parts of your life.

So I'm fully aware of the, what the research says. And I don't think a lot of people say, people know what the research is leaning towards on things like warmups and other types of things that we find in running efficiency and what helps you feel better and run well and decrease chance of injury. But honestly, a lot of people don't do it. And it's a sad thing. And I think it's mainly because of time constraints. It's not because they don't want to. I think left up to our own devices and we have endless free time in the day. I think we would probably be able to do those things. But just know that be prepared for the amount of challenges you give your body.

Don't extend yourself and make sure that you incorporate some warmups into your routine. Now give us a thumbs up for the show if you learned anything new. And please contact us if you'd like a custom program designed for your runs. We can help out with injury prevention and addressing risk factors associated to having running injuries. Just like I said, warmups are a big part. If we find that you're not doing a warmup, we'll probably design one for you. We find that your hip is stiff or your ankles stiff or you have weakness in your hip. Then we're going to design programs based upon that. So customization program is really important, at least for addressing risk factors when we're all under time constraints and we're busy people.

Great. Thanks for hanging around for the show. I hope you guys learned as much as I did by doing some of these research papers. Remember, if you want help with digesting down what your condition may need to get better and how you can get back to physical activity, just call us or email us for a consultation, which is super affordable. At this point in time, it's $29 for 30 minutes. That's with me, Mandy or Dawne Costantino. And I can't guarantee you to be that price forever, but I think right now it is. So call us 714-502-4243 or email us info at p2sportscare.com. Make sure you go into the description for the show for the links that I talked about in the podcast and subscribe and like the show if you learned anything at all.

See you guys next time.