[Fultonius]

Ok folks, a conversation on the way back from Ratho today got me thinking.

I fully understand the benefits of a decent warm up, but, there is a common mantra that says warms downs are also important.

Is the much SCIENCE to back this up?


I'm usually pretty short of time during the week and my bouldering seassion usually consist of 10 mins of easy climbing, then 20 mins or so of technique practise (which basically consists of steadily upper the difficulty while working on an aspect of my technique that needs woking - basically footwark 

Then I get stuck in to either working a few hard problems, or doing lots of volume off less hard problems. 

When I'm done, I go home. If I have some noticably tight muscles I'll maybe do some gentle stretching while waiting for my dinner to cook but I rarely spend any time doing easy problems. My recovery is usually pretty good between sessions. I can normally climb 2 days in a row then one off.


I don't reckon I'd see any benefit from warming down. What d'ya reckon?

[tomtom]

IIRC, the main study looking at the effect of warming up, took a group of Australian army recruits and during their training (ie over a few weeks) got half to warm up, and half to just get stuck in. There were no differences between both groups in terms of injuries... People on here will know far more than me about this...

[thekettle]

I cannot find any SCIENCE to support warming down as an injury reduction technique. Warming up does have substantial SCIENCE to support it, stretching (for injury reduction or reduced muscle soreness) does not.
Stretching SCIENCE here: http://saveyourself.ca/articles/stretching.php

[tomtom]

my bad

[mrjonathanr]

No science, merely conjecture that warming down from power eg campussing serves no purpose, but after volume allows blood flow to be maintained aiding removal of byproducts form an/aerobic respiration from the muscles used.

[TobyD]

I imagine that it would actually be quite difficult to come by SCIENCE for this, as any research that has been done is far more likely to be into running / cycling etc; and i would question the direct relevance of a study on an aerobic activity dependent on large muscle groups to climbing, and especially a bouldering / campussing session down the wall.

My feeling is pretty much what others have said; ie that it won't hurt, but if you have to lose something, lose the warm down not the warm up.

[Fultonius]

Nice, I can carry on just going "right, had enough - time for tea"...

I even think it could be detrimental as all you're really doing is making your muscles do MORE work when they're already fairly powered out, but it's not really useful work as it's at a low level.

[slackline]

Whenever you want to know what SCIENCE is out there I can highly recommend starting with a search on Google Scholar, a distinct advantage of it is that it often finds full PDFs of articles.

So a quick search for 'warm down anaerobic activity' lead to this....

RY Law, RD Herbert  (2007) Warm-up reduces delayed onset muscle soreness but cool-down does not: a randomised controlled trial. The Australian Journal of Physiotherapy 53:91-95

The other nice thing about Google Scholar (and many other scientific journal indexes such as PubMed) is that they also provide links to articles that cite the one of interest so you can find out what work has cited the above paper, as well as looking at the papers it cites itself for further work on the area.

HTHs

[slackline]

A slightly different search threw up...

Reilly T,  Ekblom B (2005) The use of recovery methods post‐exercise Journal of Sport Science 23(6):619-27. (albeit in football)

[Fultonius]

I did have a quick search on Scholar before posting, but whatever search term I used didn't seem to throw up much of use.

I'll have a look through those later...

[slackline]

  Didn't know you'd already tried Scholar apologies.

Often takes a few stabs at combinations of words to search with and I find looking beyond the first page of results often throws up things.

[Fultonius]

Didn't know you'd already tried Scholar apologies.

Often takes a few stabs at combinations of words to search with and I find looking beyond the first page of results often throws up things.

No need to apologise Slackers - how would you know! (it was also a very brief search and I thought the clever wads on here might have some useful links. (I.e. I was being lazy ;-)

[quiffhanger]

IIRC, Steve McClure recently wrote in an Climb article that there was some evidence that using large muscle groups after training can help stimulate growth in small muscle groups. Something like, use your forearms lots, make them receptive to "whatever makes muscles get strong" and then use some big muscle which are much better at getting your body to produce lots of "whatever makes muscles get strong".

It didn't go into detail but was an intriguing concept that might also be applicable to warm downs. I'd be interested if anyone knows more about it.

-ross

[Fultonius]

From memory that particular theory was along the lines of stressing big muscles gives a bigger hormonal response, which helps the smaller muscles grow. I.e. fingerboarding, while intense does not massively taxthe system as a whole and therefor it doesn't respond as well.

Sounds good, not sure if much work has been done to test the hypothesis though.

[thekettle]

 
It was based on the results of a bicep curl experiment (which I can't find ). Those that were prescribed leg presses in addition to bicep curls finished the program with bigger biceps than those that just did the curls.
So if you want increased muscle size it would seem this can be assisted by working the biggest muscle groups to boost the level of 'muscle growth hormones' the body releases. In the interest of remaining light for climbing I would think improving muscle recruitment is a greater priority when seeking strength gains.

[Rocksteady]

I seem to remember that small muscles got bigger gains from combination with the big compound exercises, specifically squats and deadlifts, because these exercises triggered testosterone release.

Can't find any proper science on it though, but did find this: http://fitnesspainfree.com/?p=1876

However, I wouldn't want to do too many squats/deadlifts at the same time as a lot of climbing as proper squat workouts always had me walking like a cowboy for a couple of days and would definitely preclude hard climbing. Also, I'd worry about bulking up my upper legs.

Re: the topic generally, I can find stuff about stretching pre-exercise being no good - old news
http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/34/5/324.full

I think I've also read that stretching generally doesn't have any evidence to indicate that it prevents injury.

From the Peak Performance website which I quite rate (http://www.pponline.co.uk/) I've generally taken away that pre-exercise the best thing to do is get your heart rate up a bit, and warm up the range of movement that you're going to use in the exercise session (i.e. 'dynamic stretching' (moving your muscles through the range of motion you'll need for climbing etc. and not to be confused with 'ballistic stretching', which is bouncing on a stretch))

Post-exercise I've never found anything evidence-based as to what you're supposed to do, other than stuff about nutrition for recovery.