Importance of Cool-Downs
Cooling down after your workout lets your heart rate and blood pressure slowly recover to pre-exercise levels. It helps your body effective recover from exercise. The by- products in muscles from exercise create delayed onset muscle soreness, fatigue, and even potentially overuse injuries.
How to cool down:
Cooling down is similar to warming up. You take about 20% of the actual time you train to be your cool down. Go at a slower pace and lower intensity, to facilitate general circulation and slow down your heart rate, body temperature etc.
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Examples of ways to cool down:
- To cool down after a run, walk/light bike briskly for 5 to 10 minutes
- To cool down after swimming, swim laps slowly for 5 to 10 minutes
- Stationary bikes are also good a general exercise to cool down after sports
Stretching:
If you do flexibility exercises as part of your workout routine, it’s best to do them as part of the cool-down phase. Dynamic stretching is part of the warm-up process, but prolonged stretches to increase flexibility should happen during the cool down phase. This allows the muscles to be warm when you stretch, which makes the stretching more effective.
Stretching can improve flexibility and range of motion of the muscles surrounding the joint. Improving flexibility can help reduce muscle and tendon injuries.
What is the Importance of Cool Downs?
- Post sport muscle soreness:
Muscle soreness post exercise typically comes 24 to 48 hours after exercise due to the microtears and the resultant inflammation that occurs in your muscle fibers when exercising. This is called Delayed Onset Muscle soreness (DOMS). Research has found that appropriate cooldowns reduce post exercise muscle soreness by increasing circulation and removing waste from the exercised muscles.
- Recovery:
As a result of exercising at an intense level, lactic acid and other by-products naturally accumulate throughout the body, especially in muscle. A cool down involving light aerobic exercise and static stretching are a proven method of reducing lactic acid and other exercise by products throughout the body. A cool down essentially flushes your muscles to remove by-products and provide fresh nutrition to the area. This will increase your rate of recovery, preparing your body for your next sporting event
- Flexibility
After your sporting event, your muscles will continue to be warm, which is the optimal time to engage in a stretching routine as your warm muscles can stretch further than usual. Stretching during a cool down thus will enable you to increase your flexibility.
- Improves mental state after sporting event
Competitive sporting events can be a stressful and adrenaline inducing activity, therefore implementing an appropriate cooldown can help the mind recover as much as the body. An effective cooldown allows the mind and body to slowly transition from an energetic and aware state to a relaxed and calm state.
The Role of Massage in Cool Down and Recovery:
A massage after a hard workout can be very beneficial, especially longer endurance events. Massage increases blood flow and lymphatic exchange in the muscles as well as reducing muscle creatine kinase and other exercise by-products. It also works to relax any fascia that has tightened up from exercise. Rolling is in fact a version of self massage.
The Role of Cold Tubs in Cool Down and Recovery
Immersion in cold water (around 10-15 degrees) has been used to stimulate health benefits and recovery post exercise. There have been studies done to show that athletes who soak in colder water after exercise are less likely to experience as much soreness as those who do not later on. In a study done by Lee, et al. (2021) they looked at the role of cold tubs in conjunction with cool down exercises. What they found was that when the two were used together, it can improve post exercise recovery.
The Role of systems like Normatec compression in recovery, and are they beneficial?
Normatec is a system that provides progressive compression in the lower or upper body as well as cold. The idea of Normatec’s compression tools is to wrap the entire targeted point of the body (legs and/ or arms), and create a pulsating wave of compressions to that specific area of the body. This then creates a massage pulsation sensation as a way to enhance circulation of blood flow to these targeted areas of the body, and improve lymphatic drainage. The goal of these devices is to improve overall recovery from exercise, reduce pain, swelling, and inflammation, muscle fatigue, prevent DOMS, and increase circulation. One thing to note is that if you ever decide to go this route and try out these fancy compression tools, they are incredibly pricey and can run you upwards of $1000. While it might be appropriate for elite athletes, you can achieve much of the recovery from other techniques.
References:
https://pivotalmotion.physio/the-importance-of-cooldown-in-sports/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10302181/
https://www.cnet.com/health/fitness/whats-a-normatec-the-compression-therapy-elite-athletes-love/
https://lifeline-therapy.com/blog/the-benefits-of-normatec-compression-therapy/