Do i really need to cool down after a workout?

Jog for 5-15 minutes.

Need to? No. Will it help? Probably. 5-10 minutes of light jogging followed by some ancillary work is best.

How about 5 X 50m fast on grass barefoot and then an easy walk back to your car?

I have wondered about cool downs from a training basis. Does the body respond best to what was done last? Say I wanted to reap the most benefit from 400 meter repeats, why not just stop after the last one so that it is freshest in my physiological memory? Training is based on signaling your body to compensate for a specific stimulus so perhaps we should skip the cool down and just leave it with the work. Or perhaps I am wrong and we compensate for anything that happened at any time during the workout just the same. Any thoughts?

That's a pretty bad idea. There's no cooling down from doing top speed work, it's taxing, and just increases chances of injury after you've already done a workout. It should be done when you're fresh.

Unless you meant strides and not sprints then this doesn't apply of course, but it still wouldn't really be a cool down.

jogging a cooldown will help increase endurance but if you have injuries either cool down on a soft surface such as on grass fields or the track, or walk the cooldown. it helps add to the workout, cooldown is a bit of a misnomer as unless you just ran a race you probably are not overheating.

I have no idea, but what I do, to increase the length of the aerobic input is increase the lenght of my warm-up (to as much as 45 minutes), and then after the workout I take a little break and then try and jog, walk, run for as long as possible, and it seems to be working as I improve all the time.

The long warm-up and cool-down may hamper the quality/ result of the workout, but I do not care as I am in year two of a ten year buildup period.

When I do a cooldown after a race or hard workout I feel like hell, so I don't do them much. Nothing bad seems to happen, and it would be tough to convince me that any additional benefits would accrue from doing one. I think we used to think a cooldown flushes out lactic acid, but probably no one thinks that any more.

I just do strides. That was what my high school cross country coach told us to do after our daily workouts: set of 6 strides. That's it. And I still do just that.

SprintTriathlon wrote:

The long warm-up and cool-down may hamper the quality/ result of the workout, but I do not care as I am in year two of a ten year buildup period.

Actually, a long warm up is one of the keys to success in my opinion. Especially on fast days. As a coach, I realized that a typical 5 min warm up and cool down on either end of a track day basically left my guys with havng done very little aerobic work that day. I started adding a 3mile run to the beginning of every day and we made significant gains. That one change was yuge.