Stretching and Warming Up—Not the Same Thing
Daily Tip #2
It’s good to be warm before a race, and it’s good to be flexible, too—but they’re different things achieved by different means, and the order is important.
The term “warm-up” is commonly applied to whatever an athlete does to prepare for competition (or hard training). Stretching exercises are often included in the warm-up; that’s okay, but it’s important to know when to do them. Warming up your muscles—literally raising their temperature—will make them easier to stretch out. Conversely, however, stretching a cold muscle will not make it warm, and the attempt will feel pretty awful. A proper warm-up should begin with light aerobic activity, like easy jogging, that doesn’t push your muscles’ flexibility range at all. As an old Indian yoga maxim accurately puts it, “You can bend an iron bar if you warm it up enough.” Heating up your muscles makes them looser and more malleable—just what you want before a race, and very different from that just-woke-up stiffness that an early-morning race makes you deal with. Trying to stretch muscles while they’re in that condition doesn’t just feel bad—it puts them at risk of injury. Flexibility gains can best be made after a run, when you’re very warm and can use—and extend—your full range of motion.
Here’s an effective pre-race warm-up:
• About a half-hour before the start of the race, jog for 10-15 minutes with light sweat-clothes on. (You’d go longer before a shorter race; for a half-marathon, this short version will suffice. You don’t want much extra mileage.)
• Keep the sweats on and do a gentle series of four to six “striders”—approximately 80- to 100-meter runs, gradually accelerating to about the halfway point and then holding that speed for the second half. The first strider should progress easily out of your jogging pace—no starting blocks required. Then decelerate to the jog again afterward. The striders will probably get a bit faster and feel a bit better as you go, but let that happen on its own. At the end of the last one, you should feel like you could go on much longer—but don’t. You’ve got a race to run in just a bit.
• You’ll probably be pretty warm by this point. You’ve broken a sweat and your breathing is quickened, but you’re feeling energized, not tired. This is when a gentle stretching session would make sense—but only if you’ve been doing the same exercises throughout your training buildup. Race day is not the time to try anything new. (If you want to work on your flexibility from now until the race, you can do that, but carefully. There are many stretching methods used by coaches and runners; one good system is the Active-Isolated Stretching method developed by Jim and Phil Wharton. Here they describe a stretch for each of the three main leg-muscle areas—hamstrings, quadriceps, and calf muscles.)
• Finish your stretching about ten minutes before the start. Jog a bit more. Take off your sweats—and reveal legs that are now like very warm, flexible iron bars.
Stretching is an important part of your running routine.
