That Traathlon Show, episode 35.

Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to that triathlon show. The podcast presented by

Scientifictriathlon.com. As always, I'm your host Michael and the topic of today's episode is

warming up for races. And much of what we are going to talk about today actually applies just as much to

training as it does for racing, particularly the physiological reasons why you should warm up

and how you should do it. But some of the things like logistical things that you need to take

into consideration are specific for races. So that's just the way

that I decided to structure this episode when doing my prep work for it. But other than that,

most of it is just as applicable for training as it is for racing. So let's dive right

into today's topic. First of all, most of you probably warm up

already anyway before you do any sort of hard training or racing. But do you know why you're doing it?

Do you know the actual benefits that warming up gives you? Well, let's talk about that. So first, it reduces the resistance

in your body from things like muscle stiffness, which can cause as much as a 20% reduction

in joint resistance if you just proceed immediately to working out hard or racing after just

nothing in terms of warmup compared to doing a proper

warm up. So 20% is quite a lot for muscle stiffness. So that's just one of the main reasons,

reducing resistance in the body. Second, you get increased blood flow and oxygen uptake

by your muscles from warming up. So increase blood flow, that's easy

enough to understand. And oxygen uptake, that's caused by hemoglobin, which is the oxygen-carrying

protein in your blood cell. It starts to give away twice as much oxygen to the muscles that it delivers oxygen to when the

temperature of the hemoglobin itself is raised by 5 degrees Celsius. And we know that warming up can

increase your muscle temperature. So that's one of the main goals of warming up to increase the

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