Is a cooldown necessary?

Centrowitz it is...Yes! wrote:

It is true that there is a lot of stuff on the internet that is false. I always thought that the reasons for a long cooldown are for removing toxins and increasing blood flow to muscles to provide for healing. It's to make you better for the next day.

It also might add to your aerobic conditioning level.

Please discuss (not discus, that's another event)

Cooldowns are helpful. But I think of a cooldown as 5-10 minutes of very easy running. Three miles isn't a cooldown, it's more training. That can be helpful as well.

This is a great question.

Any time people talk about "toxins" you should ask them what toxins are they talking about? Lead? Arsenic?

The immediate effects of a cool down (let's calling it easy running/jogging after a hard workout) is to buffer the acidity in the body. Our primary of buffering acidity is by exhaling it as CO2. By keeping ventilation elevated about normal levels, we speed up this process.

Depending on what you do right after, you can also prevent blood from pooling. Blood pooling increases the risk for clots.

A cool down might help keep you from getting stiff a few hours later.

However, let's say you do not cool down. Well that acidity will return to normal although it takes longer, but here we might be talking about an hour? If you are not working out until the next day, that acidity is long gone.

So a question is: If I do not cool down today will that negatively impact my workout the next day?

Check out this article with some references.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/do-we-have-to-cool-down-after-exercise/?_r=0

I was trying to avoid saying lactic acid since that is not popular in explaining how the body recovers after exercise. We are nitpicking in our terminology and I don't know why you want to do that. The fact is common toxins can cause high acidity in the body and we want to bring that level down!

In addition like I said micro-tears occur in the body and we want to provide blood flow to the muscles.

We are seeing more and more "flopping," onto the track after a race. This is grandstanding, and I'm sure there are more than a few that wind up in the hospital just for that one minute of glory.

What do you mean by "not cooling down?" Do you mean sitting immediately after a race? We have many beginners in marathons who will do just that. I hope they do not listen to you or read the thing you posted off the net.

A cool down is highly recommended!!!

Not sure why you posed the question then if you have already established such a rigid stance on the subject. As for me, I put about a 95% effort into my warmup & 5% for my cool down.

There is no reason to believe typical "cooldown" routines are of any value. Just walk 400m after the session and that should be enough.

kmaclam wrote:

Not sure why you posed the question then if you have already established such a rigid stance on the subject. As for me, I put about a 95% effort into my warmup & 5% for my cool down.

Cooling down is just as important as warming up you fool! 2 mile warm-up/cool down as been new to me in college & honestly it has helped me recover from all types of workouts!

different folks believe it useful for different things, and at different times. i think i've seen canova, for example, write: useful after track reps, but not so much after a tempo.

one thing i've pondered over the last couple years is related to something i think i've seen daniels mention, but not explore very much, is the following. i used to run with several professional tennis and squash players. a "favorite part" of training for them involved, after a long training session, just cranking on the ball as hard as possible with a training partner, keeping it in play, for 8 to 10 minutes, until the arm just became jelly. they'd then spend anywhere from 15-30 minutes just "grooving" their strokes--hitting "slowly but freely and loosely." they all swore that the 10 minutes of cranking was essential to getting this right; something about that level of fatigue of the arm allowed them to develop some new kind of unconscious, automatic, neuromuscular awareness or kinesthesia (paraphrased roughly and borrowing from the great DFW).

any possibility we get a similar effect? we're obviously not running at race pace, and so not necessarily grooving that stride, but apparently those guys weren't hitting, or moving, at anywhere close to match play pace either. i wonder if there's something about repeating the basic, even if not exact, shape of the movement in a state of extreme fatigue that's extremely beneficial, both physically and neurologically?

(on a related note, i think i saw steve magness attempt to hypothesize the simpler, narrower idea of developing better economy while fatigued at one point, although he mixed about seven ideas and was incredibly inarticulate about it, so who knows what he was actually saying).

The post from Magness:

http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2012/09/rethinking-cool-down-and-xc-coach-a.html

It's from 5 years ago. Basically it says, there's lots of theories, but no one is sure which theory is right. Everyone does it, so it's probably beneficial, but we don't have scientific studies to explain why.

It would be interesting to see what he thinks now.

At the very least an easy 10-15 min jog to avoid tightness and flush some of the crap out of your legs after a hard workout or race would be advisable.

simple answers wrote:

The post from Magness:

http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2012/09/rethinking-cool-down-and-xc-coach-a.html

It's from 5 years ago. Basically it says, there's lots of theories, but no one is sure which theory is right. Everyone does it, so it's probably beneficial, but we don't have scientific studies to explain why.

It would be interesting to see what he thinks now.

Never trust something on the internet where there is repetition of the same phrases, misspelled words, and bad grammar such as this article. I mean they made mistakes in the introduction to the story!!!

They are trying to remake the wheel.

I met Gold Medalist gymnast Peter Vidmar about ten years ago. He said they would work out about 8 hours a day. They might do exercises for 2 hours then stretch for an hour, then repeat that cycle throughout the day. They certainly did not develop weak muscles!

Slowest Olympic Champion!!!

I race better when I warm up.

I feel better the next day when I cool down.

Ice raced PR's off a 2 lap warm up and a stride due to being late.

I have felt sick after races and skipped the cool down and still ran fine the next day.

I've raced a PR off gummy bears and a soda for lunch. I've also got side cramps and wanted to stop. (Ah, high school)

So who knows.

Maybe as an experiment we will drop all warm ups and cool downs for my team. Next year limit to 800-1600 m jog. Next year 20 min and see what works best.

I can't tell you.

As far as the dietary stuff you can race fine off of Oreo cookies and a coke.

However that is true only in the short term.

The problem with young people is they are just too darn young.

There are other factors youngster...time of season, weather, number of fans.

Somebody get my chair, these young people.....I just want to kick them!

I ask: what are these toxins? If they are so common give me some names. Lactic acid/lactate is not a toxin--it is a fuel (at least lactate form).

Show me evidence that a cool down does anything to help the microtears.

I have never heard of a runner flopping at the end of a race from that hard effort ending up in the hospital.

You might want to re-read my post where I mention that you do not want blood pooling.

I guess we need a definition of a cool down. If I finish a marathon and walking through the finish area, getting food and drink am I "cooling down"? If I finish an interval session and walk around for 5 minutes, am I cooling down? Or do I need to jog for 20 minutes to count?

Yes beginning and even advanced marathoners may sit at the finish of a marathon. How many needed medical care as a result?

You asked a question. I share my views and posted an article that included quotes and links to research studies that address the question you asked. The views I stated are very much in line with those of the researchers.

Basically we have little data. A lot of tradition and supposition.

I would say there is a lot more to suggest that a warm up is a good idea than there is regarding a cool down.

However, doing studies involving warming up or not probably would never be approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). It is very hard to get a study approved if there is a high risk of harming the subject. I think we can list the potential harm that could come to a person asked to do a maximal effort with no warm up (pulled muscles, heart issue to name a couple).

Warming up makes a lot of sense. From a metabolic perspective many of the enzymes involved in ATP synthesis function better when heated a little and when the environment is a bit acidic. (Too much of either and the enzymes perform worse).

Red blood cells also give up oxygen more freely when encountering a warmer and more acidic environment (Bohr effect or oxydissociation curve).

You increase the ventilatory rate so more oxygen is coming into the body.

It seems like a good idea to increase slowly the heart rate and perfusion of the heart.

Also the warm up has an immediate effect on performance. There seems to be a dearth of evidence that shows how a cool down affects performance in a following session especially if a decent amount of time has elapsed.

For folks who say they feel better the day after a cool down, your feelings might be biased. If you think a cool down will make you feel better then it will. Far better to measure things objectively. There could be a placebo (or nocebo) effect. Same thing with ice baths (plus you add in cognitive dissonance on that one).

I just listened to a podcast where the researcher did a study on sleep. They hooked the sleeper up to a machine that measured sleep quality. When the person came into the lab, the sleeper was asked how he/she slept. If they reported sleeping poorly the researcher then told them the machine said they slept well. Then they tested cognitive function. The subjects who were told they had below average sleep performed worse than the test than those who were told they slept well. The machine did nothing to measure sleep. (Kristi Erdal researcher).