How do you warm up for a race or workout? If you're like most high school and college runners, your warm-up is probably not too far off from Joe Rubio's humorous characterization of the typical runner's pre-workout routine
"10-15
min easy. 4 half-hearted strides. BS a bit. Run the workout"
This might be sufficient if you're a novice
runner. But if you're at all serious
about competitive running, it's well worth the time to take your warm-up more
seriously. Today, I'd like to take a
look at several elements of the warm-up and consider how a more advanced runner
might use them to his or her advantage.
To be clear, the purpose of a warm-up is to get
your body ready for the demands of the workout (or the race). Because of this, different workouts or
different races will necessarily demand different warm-up routines, as will
different individual runners. If you
warm up for a 10k the same way you warm up for a mile, you probably need to
reconsider your warm-up routine. In this
article, we will analyze several elements of the warm-up routine and discuss
various ways to modify them based on the situation.
1. The warm-up run
The first and most obvious part of a warm-up
routine is the warm-up run itself. The
most basic and most common way of doing this is 8-15 minutes of easy running. This can be modified in two directions to
suit your needs: you can either do more running (20-30 minutes, for example),
or you can do some or all of the warm-up run at a faster speed.
Running at a higher intensity near the end of your
warm-up routine primes your body for a sustained effort in a workout or a
race. If you jog a bit, do a few short strides,
and start doing a workout like 8x1000m at anaerobic threshold with a minute
rest, you'll find that you don't feel your best until the second or third
repeat. That's because your body wasn't
fully revved up for the first one. Like
starting a car engine cold, you naturally feel off-kilter during your first few
minutes of faster running. If a workout
or a race is important to you, it's vital to get this off-kilter sensation out
of the way before it starts.
Now, it's not mandatory to do faster running
during the warm-up run. I do think it's mandatory to do some
sustained faster running at some point during
the warm-up as a whole, but it can also come in the form of a medium-length
repeat done before or after strides, which we'll discuss later.
