The longer you warm up, the more likely it is to accumulate lactic acid and cause fatigue

Before starting strenuous exercise, professional athletes generally have to do some warm-up exercises first. The warm-up process usually lasts for more than ten to ten minutes. Some professional skiers or field cyclists even need to do one to two hours of warm-up exercises before starting training.

It is generally believed that warm-up exercises can warm up the athlete's muscles, speed up their oxygen absorption speed, and promote the muscle's anaerobic metabolism ability, improve the muscle's potential, and ultimately improve the athlete's performance. For a long time, people have believed this. This is done. But few people have ever thought about how long it takes to do warm-up exercises to be the most appropriate? Is it really necessary to complete an exhausting one to two-hour warm-up exercise before starting training?

When Tomaras was watching a cycling race in the field, the scientist from Calgary University in Canada noticed these issues and questioned the traditional pre-sports warm-up style. He believed that excessive intensity warm-ups are likely to be counterproductive and do not help improve their athletic performance. 　　To verify his idea, Tomaras conducted an experiment. First he designed two different warm-up plans: traditional plans and simplified plans. The traditional plans included 20 minutes of cycling gradually increasing intensity, with the goal of getting the athlete's heart rate to 95% of his personal peak heart rate, followed by four sprint exercises at 8 minutes intervals. The simplified plans were much easier. The subject only had to complete 15.5 minutes of intensity incremental bicycle movement, with the target heart rate reaching 70% of his peak, and then Just follow a sprint exercise.

To complete the test, Tomaras found 10 well-trained field cyclists and asked them to complete the above two warm-up plans separately, and then complete a set of 30-second Wingate tests. The Wingate test is a physical fitness test completed on a fixed bicycle. The goal is to understand the subject's peak anaerobic exercise power in order to understand their anaerobic exercise ability. After completing the test, the subject's blood samples were drawn separately to monitor serum lactate The concentration.

The test results showed that the subjects' scores in Wingate test after completing the simplified warm-up plan were significantly higher than those after completing the traditional plan. The peak output power of the test after the simplified plan increased by 6% compared with the traditional plan, while the serum lactate concentration after the former was significantly lower than the latter. Tomaras said that the 6% gap seemed inconspicuous, but for competitive sports players, a little gap might mean missing the gold medal. He further proposed that a competition mainly focuses on anaerobic exercise All technical and sports should abandon too long and exhausting warm-up exercises and use shorter and more efficient simplified versions of warm-up exercises.

Tomaras's research tells us that warm-up exercises that are too long and too fatigued not only cannot fully stimulate athletes' potential, but instead increase the accumulation of lactic acid in athletes' bodies, making them more prone to fatigue. However, his research did not answer our questions, or it raised more new questions: Is the shorter the warm-up, the better? Or is it the most suitable for existence. The warm-up time, too long or too short, cannot fully stimulate the athlete's potential? Are different sports suitable for short-term warm-up? At present, there are few related research on warm-up before exercise, and there are even fewer researches on suitable warm-up time. Tomaras's research has opened up new horizons for us. Although many problems have not been solved, he at least told us that warm-up exercise may not be the longer the better.

However, short-term warm-up exercise may not be suitable for everyone, from Hammer, London A study by scientists at Smith Hospital showed that 45 minutes of treadmill warm-up can effectively alleviate the decrease in the amount of exhaled force during exercise by athletes suffering from asthma, thereby reducing the occurrence of exercise-related asthma. For these athletes, long-term warm-up is beneficial. It seems that finding the right degree for warm-up exercise is not as simple as imagined. How to use the most effective warm-up exercise to improve the athlete's potential as much as possible is still a question worth studying.