Road bike training: Warm up and cool down - how to achieve better performance in competition

Everyone has heard that you warm up before sport. You learn it in school sports or see it on TV when substitutes trot down the touchline in football. It is also practised in cycling: Track and time trial riders make their rollers glow, before corner races the nervous pack cranks down the track several times. After the competition, many return to the rollers: the cool-down is intended to initiate regeneration.
Warm-up and cool-down - both seem to be iron laws in sport. Above all, the arguments in favour of warming up sound familiar and logical: warm up the muscles for better motor skills and mobility, increase body temperature, stimulate blood circulation and breathing, prevent injuries. The usual rule was: the shorter the race, the longer the warm-up should last. However, scholars are now arguing about the effect of the warm-up.

Subjectively, most of us find the slow ramp-up of the effort more pleasant than a cold start: the pedalling becomes smoother and it is easier to find your breathing rhythm with a measured pre-exertion when it really gets down to business. The second interval of a hard interval training session is often easier than the first - if only because the head has first had to adjust to tolerate the pain.

LESS IS MORE

Track sprinters kick particularly short and hard. It was previously assumed that these explosive athletes should therefore warm up particularly intensively. A Canadian study of ten highly trained track sprinters from 2011 investigated how the intensity and length of the warm-up programme affect sprint performance. The researchers compared a traditional warm-up - 50 minutes with four sprint intervals and breaks in between - with a 20-minute, less intensive warm-up programme (up to 70 percent of maximum heart rate), which only included a warm-up sprint. The result was surprisingly clear: after the scientists' shorter and gentler programme, the competitive athletes performed significantly better in a 30-second sprint, which served as a benchmark!

So less can be more. And there are studies with an even more radical approach that compare the warm-up with pre-cooling, i.e. the complete opposite. You read correctly: cooling instead of warming up before the competition - and not just for a race in tropical heat.

You can read all about the right preparation and subsequent regeneration in the PDF download below.

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