Do Exercise Tips about the Value of Winding Down after a Workout Really have a Point?
My kind of exercise is all about bicycling. My cycling partner and I do our usual 10 mile circuit every weeked over picturesque roads not far from her home. The return leg is where it gets to be really fun. The last couple of miles turns out to be real race to the finish. I usually like to pedal as fast to the finish line as possible and then come to a spectacular screeching stop. My friend though likes to take the exercise reading he does really seriously. And one of the most important exhortation that exercise manuals give you tends to be about the cooldown rule. Physiology books and fitness manuals will devote entire chapters to it, and computerized home gym equipment will actually include cooldown phaces in their programming. To devotees of this exercise philosophy, at the end of any serious run of exercise, you can't just go and sit down at the end; you need to allow the body to wind down with several minutes of gentler exercise.
Which is kind of funny, considering that there is no real scientific thinking that backs it up. Cooling down is just what the gut instinct says is right. There is no scientific research that has gone into it. No one even knows what exactly a cooldown is supposed to consist of. Some people say that you just need to continue doing the same thing you were doing, only more slowly. If you are running, you need to jog, and then you need to walk before you stop. Some fitness magazines have exercise tips that recommend that you are to always include a stretching session in your cooldown.
If pressed, exercise experts don't really know what it is that a cooldown is supposed to achieve. Some say that it does away with soreness in the limbs. Some say that it makes it easier on the heart. There's really nothing to back any of it up with. The real fitness researchers that actually exist can only agree on one single benefit that a cooldown will bring you. When the body is hard at work during exercise, the blood vessels leading to the legs expand to send more blood to the extremities. With your heart primed to send all that blood down to the far reaches, if you suddenly stop, it could cause blood to collect around your legs, and it could make you feel faint. And the stronger and better trained you are, the worse this problem affects you. Anyone who is well-trained has a heart that is so capable, it only needs to beat this low rates to keep up. If you are physiologically that well-trained, your heart will be able to slow down really quickly to its normal pace; that will only cause blood to stagnate in your legs even more.
But this seems really like scraping the barrel for something to show for the theory. What you really want to know is, does it matter at all to your average athlete who exercises no more than a certain amount each week? But no one just stands there when they are done; they move around, get a shower walk to the car and so on. It doesn't matter that it actually has to be more of the same kind of exercise. Where exactly do these exaggerated exercise tips originate from?
Popular exercise tips have a certain theory they promote religiously. It is that heavy exercise causes the muscles to produce lactic acid; the muscles become sore when there is too much of it and not enough time to clear it out, and tihis state brings on fatigue and muscle pain, goes the theory. In truth though, lactic acid has nothing to do with soreness. To cyclists like me, lactic acid is actually good; it is converted into glycogen when you don't cool down, and glycogen is a great muscle fuel. When you do cool down, the lactic acid is dissipated and wasted. So there you go; another great set of exercise tips laid to rest.
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