by Portland Velo's own Health & Fitness Guru
Warm-up. Cool-Down.
Concepts fixed in the folklore of cycling. And concepts considered, oh, let's say "quaint" by way too many Velo-ites, particularly on the Saturday club ride where Full Frontal Assault, 74-Gun Broadside, Drop the New Guy, and No Quarter are more the operative terms.
Yes, yes, yes, we've all seen the Saturday onslaught, and most of us have willingly participated. Take a right out of the Longbottom lot, another right on Evergreen, then wait for the sonic boom.
Warm-up? Uh, not unless you want to do the rest of the ride solo. Not a good thing. Not good at all.
So, listen up.
Your body is much like a car's engine. A smart driver piddles along at low-revs for a bit until the engine reaches optimum operating temperature. This produces both better performance and higher engine longevity. Ditto, your bod. It, too, needs time to reach its ideal working temperature, time to gradually goose the HR and open the delivery gates to working muscles. To do so, to ease into it, will mean that you will not only ultimately have a faster ride, but you'll also enjoy it a hell of a lot more.
Study after study have established this certainty: Elevating the body temperature gradually (and well before you hit it hard or hilly) allows oxygen to be released into the blood much more effectively; energy output becomes more efficient, and muscle viscosity improves. So a warm-up of easy-working-to-moderate intensity gets your whole body physiologically prepped for the more rigorous riding to come.
I mean, you're going to be doing 40, 45, 50 miles for God's sake, so what's the rush? Going a bit more mellow and a bit less manic for maybe 5 freaking minutes can make all the difference. Alas, too many of our breed consider such cruising "wasted time". Wrong. Wrong.
Wrong.
There are 3 ways to warm-up for exercise: Passive (hanging out in a warm environment, like Longbottom); General (anything that moves the body such as 5 minutes of jogging in place or jumping jacks. Which, I suppose, you could do, but a) it doesn't carry over well to a specific activity such as cycling, and b) you look like a horse's ass doing it.
No, the best warm-up is Specific: A low intensity version of the exercise you are about to perform. Since we are bike riders, this means biking. How much? 5 minutes is good, 10 is better. How hard? No more than about 50% effort. Where? Ride down to the corner of Shute and back to do your time. Or ride down to Hillsboro Stadium and circle the parking lot a few times. The route is irrelevant. Saddle time/minimal intensity is the thing.
What about stretching, you ask? Good warmup, right? Au contraire, brothers and sisters. A lousy, possibly harmful "warm up", a bastardization of the term.
THE JOURNAL OF SPORTS MEDICINE recently published a study titled "Stretching and injury prevention: an Obscure Relationship". The title pretty much says it all: Stretching just ain't what it's cracked up to be. In fact, clinical evidence suggests that pre-exercise stretching (of cold muscles) does nothing to prevent injuries, in fact may help cause them, and that cyclists and runners are far better off doing mild aerobic work to heat up the muscles, stimulate circulation, elevate the body's core temperature, and put head and heart on exercise alert. The study further noted that stretching of muscles and tendons for cycling, "where range of motion is limited", offers no advantage at all. Cyclists "are not 100-meter runners or gymnasts," the researchers write. "Think about how far your ankle, knee, hip, and lower back actually bend when you ride. Not far."
Moreover, the study cautions, "If you want to stretch after an aerobic warm up, keep the stretching light and relaxed. NEVER (my caps) use stretching to warm a muscle instead of riding." Because, baby, no matter how much you stretch, until you actually ride, it's still cold in there.
And at the other end of the ride: Chill, Chill, Chill.
Quick show of hands out there!
How many out there in Velo-Land shut it down at the final stoplight on Evergreen, click down to the small ring, and gently spin all-but-resistance-free from there to the LB parking lot? Okay, got it. Just needed the fingers on one hand for the total.
Now, how many, at this same point on the course, hear the starter's pistol go off in their demented minds and ride hard enough to blow an O-ring from there to the lot? Yep, just what I thought.
Bad dogs. BAD dogs.
What you should do, what you NEED to do is cool-down over the final 5 minutes of a hard ride (and on Saturday, is there ever any other kind?). Note I say COOL-down, not warm-down. What you are doing, literally, is letting all your organs and muscles and assorted internal plumbing cool down, back to the body temps you had when you were driving out to the ride, your "stasis" temp. What you are doing is letting your core temperature drop and your HR and hormone levels to get back to normal. Various studies show that a lower resting HR is achieved after a ride as a result of a cool-down. You also get improved heart function and general cardiac health when you get off the bike after a cool-down period vs. sprinting into the parking lot and immediately dismounting, HR still in the Red Zone.
My own cardiologist must have told me this a dozen times over the past few years. Those 5 (or whatever) easy minutes at the end of a hard ride really promote blood return to the heart from your just-worked-to-the-max muscles. If you are just temperamentally unable to resist the "challenge" of full gas over the final mile of the Saturday ride, then, fine, just make sure you do at least 5 minutes of gentle spinning before exiting the saddle.
There you have it, then: Warming up and cooling down are not "wasted time"; rather, there are essential ingredients, twin "bookends", in safe, fun, hard riding, and overall heart health.
Not that I expect to see anything different next Saturday. Or the one after that. Or the one . . .
But at least you've all been informed. My work here is done.