Physiology of Warming Up

Was sitting here thinking, trying to get refocused, what is it that injures race horses? There are so many things. Here's a short list coming immediately to mind:


1. Inherent fragility.
2. Inappropriate training
3. Inappropriate warm up
4. Bad riding

One could go on and on of course, but, I'm focusing on warm up and specifically in this post on physiology to serve as a basis for discussion.

Warming up for me began too many years ago getting ready for summer football practice in the early morning all by myself out on the field. Part of it was a series of 40 yard wind sprints, and I'd do anywhere from 4 to six sprints. Of course this was way before the term "exercise physiology" meant anything to me at all. I was just trying to make the football team. But, even in this process physical reality has it's way of imposing itself upon you. The "process" of going through the series of sprints both mental and physical, which I still recall to this day, is instructive to the whole subject of "warming up".

As a youngster of 15 or 16 years old from the very start of my sprinting I understood instinctively that that first sprint was the warm up, and still recall to this day motoring down the 40 yards over the grass at maybe 75% speed for the first one, making a mental checklist of my body parts, my breathing, my legs, my knees, as I became slowly cranked up.

The second sprint was always easier and faster, but I was still monitoring the situation in terms of speed and preventing injury. By the third sprint the injury concern was in the background and I began to think of performance and "time", and by the fourth sprint, it was simply all out to try to go faster than my previous efforts.

In short, getting through the sprints was a process. Interestingly it has a mental aspect in that the human athlete is monitoring themselves and deciding when "all out" is possible in terms of injury prevention. As I became more sophisticated as a youngster I would add pre-sprint stretches and short spurts. When I later became a distance runner I honed the warm up to the the point of science completely understanding that both my early performance and ability to complete a run without injury depended in part on the appropriateness of warming up.

Of course since the early days as a young athlete I've come a long way in understanding the warm up, and I'll try to put it into physiological terms next post. But, for this post, I think I've introduced the first little bit of physiology, which is actually the mental aspect of the athlete monitoring themselves from their position of rest to the moment of max performance. For our equine friends, need we say it, it is the human handlers who provide the monitoring. More on this next post.

Training: Art's last workout was Thursday. The abscess, knock on wood, has resolved itself. He'll be reshod tonight and hopefully will work out.