Edited by Dr. Dario Mirra
Warming up is a physiological and / or psychological practice that aims to create the optimal conditions for carrying out a performance, both in competition and in training.
The heating aims to:
- Facilitate the use of oxygen by the muscles.
- Increase lung ventilation.
- Raise your heart rate.
- Create more blood supply to the muscles involved in the work.
- Open the capillaries which are normally closed in resting conditions.
- Eliminate metabolic waste from the training session more effectively.
- Allowing the achievement of an optimal temperature for performance.
- Decrease the internal viscosities of the structures responsible for movement.
- Optimize receptor sensitivity.
- Create an "optimal excitation of the nervous system.
These are obviously general considerations, in fact, it is easy to deduce that every sport has peculiar types of heating.
Specifically, Body Building is a lactic acid anaerobic sport, which typically in a training session uses three or four exercises per muscle group, with medium-high overloads.
There are several methods that various athletes use before their work-out to obtain an optimal warm-up.
The methodologies can be the most varied and disparate, but in principle it is necessary that they exploit three main rules:
- Use of progressive loads until the target training load is reached.
Example: let's take for example the crosses with dumbbells on a flat bench, and let's assume that I have to try my hand at 4x10 and that my training weight is 100 kg. I will perform several series with a medium-high number of repetitions that gradually accustom my structure and my nervous system to support this load in an optimal way.
- Wider excursion than the training one. Taking advantage of the previous principle, that is to use progressive loads, it would be good to work with joint excursions that are wider than those used when using the target load, and that reduce until the optimal working excursion is reached as the load increases. , and approach that used in our training series.
Example: always taking advantage of the crosses on a flat bench, with my 100 kg and with a "90 ° excursion (by hypothesis), in my progressive warm-up series I will use slightly greater amplitudes than the training one, 100 ° (always by hypothesis) and as the load rises, the excursion gradually decreases up to 90 ° of my training series, in order to lower the friction and accustom my nervous system to this range of work.
- Decrease viscosity and joint and muscle friction. By exploiting the previous principles, thus optimizing performance from a nervous, biochemical and mechanical point of view.
As for the "activation with" cardio "machines, these have a" limited usefulness as a simple aerobic activation does not prepare the system for work with high loads and important tensions; moreover, the gesture of running, biking or any tool used for aerobic activation involves movements that do not reproduce the gesture that will be done with the handlebar, isotonic machine or barbell, and again the aerobics uses glycogen as an energy source very important muscle for our Body Building work-out.
