Hello everybody and welcome to you today's episode of the Run to the Top

Extra Kit daily podcast. My name is Haley Munn, one of the coaches here

at Runners Connect and it is great to talk to you guys today. I hope you're all having a fantastic day whatever you're up to and I hope

running is going well for you right now. For today's episode I want to quickly talk to you

about cool downs, you know, the two, three miles slog that you do after

after the end of a hard session. And the reason I want to talk to you about this today is because I got a question from one of my athletes about why we do cool downs and do we need to do the cool downs? Can we just like if we need to cut the workout short can we just cut the cool down and keep the workout,

why do we need to do them?

It's a good question and I think there's a lot of kind of misconceptions about what the

cool down actually does and maybe it's not given enough

credit in terms of it actually being a valid part of the training session as well.

So I hope to share a little bit more with you today about how you can get the most from

your cool down and why you should do cool down. So yeah so most hard workouts are followed by a

cool down. I know that I used to hate cool downs. I just done a hard workout or a tempo and now I had to drag myself around a two, three mile death match.

I'd rather just curl up on the sofa in these and refueling and rehydrating much better, much more fun.

And yeah, it was pretty crazy like I found the cool down harder than the session itself. I think it's just kind of a mental block I had against it and I didn't really feel like

you know the session was the big part and they're kind of reps or temper or whatever and this was just it just felt

pretty annoying and pointless when I just wanted to go go home. The traditional view of a cool down is that it's a way to keep the blood

flow going after a harder workout to clear out the byproducts of harder exercise like a lot of people think of like lactic acid. But it's also

true that if you wait for a day or so before working out hard again, those bipods will be

gone anyway. Your body's really good at clearing

Lactic acid and you don't really need to do a cool down to do that. So what is the

cool down doing? Well, research is looking at animals and people in the various types of stress

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