Many people know the importance of exercising on a daily basis, but not many know that you really need to warm up your body with warm up stretches before your jump into your activity. You can injure your body rather easily while working out if you don’t stretch your body out beforehand, so it is important to remember some warming up stretches that can help you prevent an injury from happening.
Stretching is absolutely vital when it comes to exercising because it lets your body know that some intense activity is coming. You also won’t pull a muscle if your body gets jerked in any direction while you are working out.
You should actually be stretching before any kind of physical activity, even if you don’t consider it to be your workout for the day.
If you are going to play basketball with your friends after work one day, you should really be stretching yourself out before you get out on the court.
It may seem useless at first, and most people don’t start stretching before physical activity until they have some kind of injury while exercising.
Proper warm up stretches
An important thing to remember while doing your stretching exercises is that you need to do them properly.
There are plenty of people out there who think they are helping their body by doing some stretching before they work out, but they aren’t putting in enough effort to make the warm up effective.
If you aren’t going to do your warm ups properly, then you may as well just not do them at all.
It may make you feel better when you think you are doing something to help the safety of your body, but there is a huge difference between helping your body and just giving yourself some baseless satisfaction. Once you have stretched your body out a bit, you should do some very light cardio to get the blood flowing.
After you have done your cardio, you are then ready to start your real workout.
Warming up and cooling down
Everyone knows that you should be doing warm up stretches before you do any physical activity, but not many people are aware that you should also stretch your body after the activity is over. Stretching beforehand is a bit more important in the grand scheme of things, but you should really remember to stretch afterwards too.
Most people are very happy to get their workout over with as quickly as possible, which is why most people tend to skip stretching at the end. Instead of heading back home after your workout, you should remember to stretch your body and cool it down from all the intense activity that just occurred.
Working out and exercising is great for your body, but you have to remember to take care of your body to the fullest extent if you want to reap the benefits from a workout. Not stretching before and after a workout will leave you sore for days, which will also cut into your future workout time. To keep your body healthy and fit, always remember to do your warm up stretches and cool down exercises.
