Best practive dictates that any training session should start with a warm-up.
The reasons for this are many. A warm-up not only prepares the athlete for the activity to come – but the physiological effect and body’s production of adrenalin, increases the heart rate and dilates capillaries; it also increases the temperature of the body as a whole.
This increase in body temperature results in increased elasticity of the muscles- thereby reducing the potential incidence of injury.
The warm-up has several positive functions. In summary the functions of a warm up are as follows:
- Avoidance / Minimization of Injury
- Improving Performance – through Body and Mental Preparedness
- Increasing Flexibility and Elasticity
- Familiarization of the SwimFast Ergometer and its Exercise Action
A pre-warm-up can be undertaken prior to getting onto the SwimFast Ergometer with the goal to gently raise the heart rate, ready for activity. This can be achieved through gentle jogging or perhaps some other activity such as skipping or say arm-circling.
The pre-warm-up should be carried out for about approx. 5 minutes, followed by some gentle stretching exercises.
Stretches should be all-over stretches, taking care to stretch muscles throughout the whole body not just the arms! This can then be transitioned to some specific warm-up activity on the SwimFast Ergometer.
It is important to remember that the more intense the training or event activity, the longer the time that should be taken for warm-up.
Example Warm Up
Once on the SwimFast Ergometer, a specific warm-up could consist of 3-4 minutes of gentle swimming on the SwimFast Ergometer at low intensity and then transitioning to say 30 strokes, 40 strokes and 50 stokes [counting each side] of progressively increasing intensity “surges.” These surges can be followed by a gentle recovery period of say 2 minutes gentle swimming between each increase in frequency. [surge]. This can be repeated several times in order to achieve the level of warm up that is desired by the athlete.