OLD practices and traditions always contradict with new practices and proven facts.
Warm-up and stretching are most important primary routine into exercise, workout, training or sports activities. Failure to do so may cause numerous injuries.
Over the years, practices without the proper understanding have led to, pulled muscles, strains, sprains, dislocations and many other known and unknown injuries due to the ignorance of the proper procedures.
Many from the old practice stretch before warming up and some don’t even bother warming up or stretch before working out, training, sports activity etc. which commonly result to unnecessary pains in the body or worse, injury. So what is the proper procedure? Warm-up before stretching or stretch before warming-up?
After various studies, it was found out the proper procedure is to warm-up first before doing any stretching, warm-up is essential and should be performed to help ensure your muscles are working through their proper range of motion. While stretching comes after the muscles are properly warmed-up or conditioned to move with less stiffness, stretching keeps the muscles flexible, strong, and healthy.
Flexibility is needed to maintain a range of motion in the joints or the muscles could shorten and become tight. When there is lack of flexibility, the muscles are weak and unable to extend all the way that is when injuries are susceptible to happen commonly damaging the muscles that could not cope with the activity being asked of.
Common warm-up exercises are light jogs, marching in place and some calisthenics, targeting muscles and joints to primary move and work normally, depending on physical body condition and ability warm-ups could be quick or thorough. Some cases may require specialized warm-up exercises to cater to related or complicated conditions.
More than anything, we must be aware that when our body rests or when our body settles our muscles, joints etc. rests and settles too. That is the reason we need to awaken it through proper warm-up to make sure that all systems are working before making it work beyond its usual range and subsequently push it beyond its limit to attain our physical goal.