Warming up

What do you do at the start of every training session? You warm-up. The first part of any session is all about warming-up your body, getting into the right mind frame, and pre-paring for the session ahead. It's pretty basic stuff and something most people do without even thinking about it. Nonetheless it's worthwhile understanding some basics about warming-up and what kind of warm-up to do in various situations - training and racing.

There's volumes of information around about warming-up, and what happens both physiologically (eg, increased blood flow, increased muscle temperature, improved range of motion) and mentally (eg, clearing the mind, reviewing skills and strategy). Each explanation inevitably includes examples of warm-up exercises to do - all equally beneficial in various circumstances - and provide a great basis for looking at specific warm-ups for triathlons.

It's worth noting at this point that not every session needs a structured warm-up, as such, for things like easy runs, easy rides and the like. While there is a still a warming-up stage you go through in the early part of the session, the following explanation is more suited to the times you're doing an "interval" type session or race.

The basic structure for a warm-up is as follows:

1. Aerobic Start-Up
2. Drills and Skills
3. Pace Preparation
4. Good to Go

Additionally is equipment and clothing preparation, hydration considerations, nature calls, etc. Ideally, these stages follow-on from each other in close succession or else you'll cool-down and need to go back a stage or two to adequately warm-up.

Aerobic Start-Up

This stage is common to every session we ever do. You head out the door and ease your way down the street. It doesn't matter how fast or slow you go, just get going and take your time for the blood to start flowing, heart rate to pick up, the rhythm and feel for the movement to develop, and your mind to start focusing on what you're doing. This will take a varying amount of time for each person, depending on the weather, your level of fatigue, arousal and other factors. It's important not to rush into this stage too fast, or force yourself too hard. Just relax and ease your way into exercise over the course of 5-20mins and you'll be well on the way to being ready for your session.

I don’t recommend static stretching once you’ve completed this stage – it stalls your warm-up plus and is far better being done once you’ve finish the whole session or race.

An important role of this stage is listen to the things your body is telling you. The early minutes are an important time to pick-up on messages about how you're actually feeling, any little injury niggles, your health and more. However the messages may be confusing, and may take some time to become clear. It takes a lot of experience and understanding of your body to be able to interpret it reliably and accurately. Nonetheless, the signals during the Aerobic Start-Up are invaluable and can have a bearing on your session or race.

Drills and Skills

Following the Aerobic Start-Up stage is the time where you click your mind and muscles into the desired movement patterns for what's ahead. Drills and skills could be a routine part of every session - up to 5mins each time - because when they're repeated often enough they help to develop and refine your technique in an on-going manner. This stage applies equally to every sport.

There's a myriad of drills and skills for each sport, where you should select 2-3 different ones which have a different focus from one another, and run through each one for 1-2 mins. As with all drills, the important things to remember are to relax, concentrate on executing good technique, and to use the drill to focus your mind on the session ahead. Keep the drills and skills continuous - they should not send you into oxygen debt(!) but nor should they be a stroll. They should maintain a similar of slightly higher heart rate than the Aerobic Start-Up. Dynamic stretching can be incorporated into the drills and skills stage, also.

Don't overdo drills and skills before a session or race, and if you're new to them, introduce them gradually...especially running drills.

Pace Preparation

Along with the Aerobic Start-Up, the Pace Preparation stage is the most important part of the warm-up. This stage is what really tunes you up for the intensity and effort of the session or race ahead. The aim is to replicate the pace and speed of movement that you'll experience, but over a short distance so that this stage is not a training session, as such.

Pace preparation consists of reps over a duration of 15-30 seconds, with a recovery of about x 2-3 of the duration of the rep. Typically you’d do about 5-10 such reps. Within each rep use the first 3-5 seconds to build your pace to about 90-95% of max (this is NOT a sprint), and hold that pace for the duration of the rep. Each successive rep will feel slightly faster than the previous one as your body adapts to the pace, your range of motion increases and your neurological system develops it’s ideal rhythm.

It’s really important not to race these reps – they are at your own effort level. Relax and concentrate on feeling rhythm, feel and movement for the sport you’re doing. Don’t force it…just work your way into and through the reps so that by the end you feel ready for the session or race ahead.

Good to Go

This stage is marked by not really doing much physically at all!! It’s more of a time to mentally prepare for the session or race ahead, to make sure you understand the workout details, race strategy, or similar. It’s important to keep moving to maintain the looseness you’ve already achieved during the warm-up, which may be by repeating some drills, short pace reps, or just staying loose. Cover up and keep warm, if necessary.

A small problem with this stage is that it can allow you to think too much about what’s ahead, which may “do your head in” via analysis paralysis. This is a mental skill to practice in training racing, so you maintain optimal arousal until you start the session or race. Repeating a mantra can help, one like “loose as a goose” can relax you. Ideally this stage will be little more than a pause in proceedings and flow-on from the preceding warm-up.

A good warm-up is the entry point to a good training session, which in turn is an entry point to good race performances. It’s something you can practice over and over, and learn how to adapt it to various scenarios to help you manage your body to get the most from it when it counts.