By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

As runners who always want to perform at our best, it is normal to have more fun running at race pace than going through all the peripheral stuff that gets us there. Stretching, cooldown, mobility drills, reps, days off and very often, warming up properly. Unfortunately, many runners see the warmup not as an element that to enhance your workout, but a waste your time or something to screw your average pace.

Reasons to skip your warmup abound. You may want to keep up with the buddy that runs faster than you, or you may be afraid of what your friends will say when they see you in Strava. Maybe you’re on a rush to get to that runner’s high. Whatever your reason is, you are not helping yourself in becoming neither a better athlete nor a healthier runner.

Ethiopian runners go out of their way to force themselves to run super slow while warming up.

In the book “Out of Thin Air”, anthropologist Michael Crawley, went to Ethiopia to learn about its running culture. He explains how locals start running painfully slow. They go to the forest to warm up zigzagging around trees, assuring that pace can’t be picked up; and in a single file, to guarantee that nobody will be surging ahead of time.

You don’t have to be an Ethiopian, Kenyan, or Ugandan to apply the slow warmup concept. Western elite runners apply it all the time. In his book “Run for Your Life”, Dr. Mark Cucuzzella, tells how he sometimes runs 13, or 14-minute miles and still feel happy to be out there running. This is a guy who has won marathons, and into his 50s, can still run sub-3.

The Purpose and Value of Warming Up

Steve Magness, former coach at the University of Houston (in my opinion one of the most knowledgeable coaches on the scientific side of our sport), reassures that the warmup sets up your run. It helps you get the body revved up and prepared for whatever we want it to accomplish with it.

“Physiologically -he explains- we get our core temperature, body temperature and muscle temperature up a little bit. We get our metabolism going, we get our VO2 up, and we are priming the body’s systems. If I didn’t do a warmup and just went out the door and start running as hard as I can, my energetic system wouldn’t be ramped up and ready to go. Then, my body will try to cover all the energetic demands with the anaerobic system before the aerobic system is ready.”

Coach Steve Magness explains the physiological and psychological benefits of warming up properly.

“From a physiological side, you are priming your motor system so when it comes time to flip the switch to work hard, your body can recruit the muscle fibers to do the job”, assures Magness.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a doctor to understand the multiple benefits of what was said in the last two paragraphs. The more you work on your warmup and the more you make it part of your daily routine, the more you will realize its benefits during the hard part of your workouts. And soon enough, without noticing, it will become part of your ritual.

“The warmup also gets you in the best psychological state -continues Magness- so you can see your training or your race as a challenge instead of a threat. Something you can take on instead of confronting. It can give you a semblance of control in a situation where you often lack it.”

Keys to the Warmup

The warmup is a personal aspect of your training. You need to find out what it works for you, not what works for your friend or for Eliud Kipchoge.

When we talk about warming up it is not exclusively about running. Dynamic stretching and mobility drills should be part of it, too. This includes easy lunges, hip and ankles rotations, etc. Remember that arms are a key element of your running, so include range of motion of arms, and arm swings as part of your ritual.

The key to the warmup, I insist, is to go slow. Very slow. You can’t be worried on what that it will do to your Strava averages. But, if you can’t control yourself and you must brag to your friends, stop the watch after warmup and then start another session with the work portion of your workout. This should suit your ego just fine.

How long should you warm up? You don’t want to be burning more glycogen than necessary. For a long-distance runner (5k and over), 10 to 15 minutes is usually sufficient.

“Glycogen is a limited resource in the muscle tissue and organs – explains Jonathan Marcus, Head Coach at High Performance West- so, if you start warming up too fast, the body has to cover the gap burning a high-efficient energy source that you should be using during your hard workout, or race, before you even get started. This is why the warmup needs to be taken super slow.” 

If you are not warming up properly, today is the perfect time to adjust, make it part of your ritual and start reaping its benefits.