Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up. My name is

Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy. The exercise cool down is poorly understood and today I hope to

make it clear that cooling down after a workout is just as important as the warm up and should be

done on a regular basis.

After any workout, whether it's cardio or weights, your muscles are tired and very quickly

begin to break down in order to rebuild. That time, right after you finish exercising, is a

critical time for muscle tissue repair, strength building, and overall recovery.

And that, my friends, is where your cool down comes into play. The obvious and perhaps main goal of

your cool down is to gradually bring your heart rate down to a closer to normal resting rate.

And sure, you can accomplish this by simply walking out of the gym and sitting in your car

as you drive to a coffee shop for a celebratory frappé, but there's more to it than that.

Those clever folks who make time to indulge in a thorough and perhaps even luxurious cool down, well, they report that the

sheer ritual of the cool down helps with mental clarity and also gives them a healthy and

satisfying sense of accomplishment, and I don't think anyone gets that from sitting in a cold car

in traffic. Now, not all of us have time for what I would call

a luxurious cool down, but there must be a middle ground, right? To find that, let's look at

the actual benefits of a good cool down and how to achieve them. And the first benefit is blood flow.

Okay, here's cool down benefit number one, blood flow.

At its most basic, a cool-down after a workout simply keeps your blood circulating at a comfortable

rate throughout the body.

After a workout ends, you would ideally continue some activity, but begin to perform it at a slower

and slower pace until you're moving at a normal

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