Reasons for Warm Ups Before Exercise

Every week, the average American should enjoy 2.5 hours of aerobic exercise, along with a couple days of strength-building exercise, recommends the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But don't just hit the running track or gym cold -- warming up before you exercise, no matter what type of exercise you do, is the first stage of any proper workout routine. A 10-minute warm-up that involves a lighter, easier version of your regular exercise -- such as light jogging before your actual run -- offers several health and physiology benefits.

Increased Blood Flow

• The vessels that carry blood to your skin and muscles are normally quite narrow. Warming up before you exercise helps those vessels to expand and dilate, allowing more blood to reach your muscles more freely. This is important for exercise because your muscles will need increased blood flow when you start working out, and warming up helps prepare your body for optimal blood delivery.

Preparing Your Heart

• While exercise has numerous health benefits for your heart, such as helping to reduce cholesterol levels, the act of exercising can itself put a strain on your heart muscles. Warming up helps protect your heart from irregular heartbeats and heart strain by slowly increasing the heart's work instead of forcing it to go from a sedentary heart rhythm to a workout heart rhythm quickly. A good analogy for this is your car's engine on a cold winter's day. If you start your car and force the engine to go from its cold state to immediately driving on the freeway, you run the risk of damaging the engine because it hasn't been warmed up yet.

Protection from Muscle Strain and Injury

• Nothing curbs your workout enthusiasm and progress like getting sidelined with an injury. Warming up helps to loosen your muscles, release tense tissue and limber up your joints, which in turn helps to reduce your risk of exercise-related injuries and muscle strains. In fact, in a study published in the "Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport," researchers did a meta-analysis of five studies that researched the effects of warming up, and noted that three of the studies reported that warming up before exercise "significantly reduced the injury risk."

Performance Enhancement

• Warming up can help boost your exercise performance, according to a La Trobe University study. Researchers had athletes perform a low-load warm up before lifting weights and noted that the muscles involved were able to lift heavier weights with reduced fatigue compared to athletes who did not warm up. Performance boosting may be a result of the warm up preparing muscles for optimal movement while also enhancing blood flow. This, in turn, increases energy and helps efficiently remove waste material that could impede muscular performance.