 Does warming up actually improve your cycling performance? And if so, what is the most effective warm-up strategy? How long should your warm-up be and what intensity should it be done at? This is what we'll be focusing on today, as well as addressing warming up in hot and cool conditions and whether or not stretching is beneficial to include in your warm-up routine or not. At the end of the video, I'll be going over what an optimal warm-up routine should look like and situations in which a warm-up is critical and others in which a warm-up may actually hurt your performance. Welcome back to another video. My name is Dylan and for weekly science-based coaching videos just like this one, be sure to subscribe. The question of what is the most effective warm-up is one that I've gotten a lot and it's a good question too. At the start of any race, you'll probably see everything from riders just standing around waiting for the start to riders getting on the trainer an hour and a half beforehand and doing multiple sprints to get ready. Do I want to start warming up? No, man. I'm just going to shock on a monster on the starting line. Not to be fine. Plus, I need a good excuse for why I got dropped in the first five minutes. When it comes to warm-ups, what's the best approach? Do you need to spend a significant amount of time on your bike to get ready or is a shorter warm-up more effective? Let's first address the question of whether or not warm-ups in general are effective at improving cycling performance. This study on the effect of warm-up on cycling time trial performance had subjects perform a three-kilometer time trial after no warm-up, an easy warm-up, or a hard warm-up. What they found was that subjects performed significantly better after a warm-up regardless of whether it was hard or easy, with a performance enhancement on the order of 2-3%. And these findings have been confirmed in the literature. This meta-analysis on the effects of warming up on physical performance found 32 high-quality studies and of these studies 79% showed a performance improvement with a warm-up. They also found little evidence to suggest that warming up is detrimental to sports performance. Those are the results we probably expected and probably intuitively already knew. Most people feel better after they've gotten some time to pedal around. But what is the most effective warm-up strategy? Is a longer or harder warm-up more effective or are you just wearing yourself out by doing this? This study on warm-up intensity on performance in sprint cycling had subjects perform a one-minute sprint after an easy, moderate, or hard warm-up. Interestingly, they found no difference in power between the three warm-up intensities. This may lead one to the conclusion that what you do during your warm-up doesn't matter that much as long as you're getting in some kind of warm-up. However, other studies come to different conclusions. This study had a similar setup testing the effect of warm-up intensity on sprint cycling performance. They found that power decreased with an increased warm-up intensity. And it's not like they had subjects do some crazy hard workout as their warm-up before they tested them. Each warm-up was only six minutes long. The moderate warm-up was six minutes at 40% of peak aerobic power. And the heavy and severe warm-up was the same, but with a one-minute effort at 80 or 110% of peak aerobic power respectively, followed by a 10-minute recovery period before the actual test started. Now, while this does provide some valuable insight, these studies aren't really investigating what cyclists typically do during a warm-up. For that, we turn to this study which tested the effects of a traditional and experimental warm-up on 30-second sprint performance. The traditional warm-up began with 20 minutes of cycling with a gradual, intensity increase of 60% to 95% of maximal heart rate, then four sprints were performed at 8-minute intervals. The experimental warm-up was shorter with less high intensity, intensity increase from 60% to 70% of maximal heart rate over 15 minutes, then just one sprint was performed. What they found was that peak power and total work was greater when subjects did the shorter and easier experimental warm-up. And this isn't just one study showing these kinds of results. This study on the effects of warm-up on severe, intensity cycling performance found that while a moderate and heavy warm-up improved performance, doing sprints was about as effective as doing no warm-up at all in terms of power production in a five-minute test. What this all boils down to is this. While warm-ups are important, it's easy to overdo it. When it comes to warm-ups, a less-is-more approach is often the most effective strategy. Stick around to the end of the video if you want to see me go over what your warm-up should look like in different cycling situations. Spoiler alert, just start every ride as hard as you can go, especially if it's a casual group ride. The warm-up is a perfect opportunity to drop riders who aren't ready. Remember, a drop is a drop. Now, let's talk about temperature and how that affects your warm-up. As it turns out, there is an optimal temperature for exercise. This study on the effect of temperature on prolonged cycling performance tested performance at a variety of temperatures from 3 degrees to 30 degrees Celsius. They demonstrated that there is a clear effect of temperature on exercise capacity, which appears to follow an inverted U relationship, meaning that there is an optimal temperature for performance. Both too cold and too hot had a negative impact on time to exhaustion, and the temperature at which subjects performed the best was around 10 degrees Celsius or 50 degrees Fahrenheit. This is part of why a warm-up is effective, because you're quite literally warming or raising the temperature of your muscles. This study tested this by looking at how muscle temperature affected sprint performance. They had subjects complete a 15 minute warm-up followed by 30 minutes of rest before a 30 second sprint test. During the 30 minute rest period, subjects were either normal, insulated, or heated pants. Muscle temperature was higher in the group with the heated pants, and this resulted in a 9% increase in peak and relative power output. And this review article concludes that the majority of the effects of warm-up have been attributed to temperature related mechanisms. This gets tricky when we're talking about warming up in different conditions. There's different things to keep in mind when warming up for a cold race versus warming up for a hot race. As we've seen, raising the temperature of your muscles is beneficial, but letting your body get too hot like when it's already hot outside can actually be detrimental to performance. In this study on the effects of heat stress on exercise performance in elite cyclists, they took cyclists from the Australian national team and had them complete a 30 minute time trial at 32 degrees and 23 degrees Celsius. What they found was that mean power decreased by 6.5% when subjects rode in the heat. It's also important to note that as the test went on, the power during the hot condition dropped lower and lower while power during the control trial stayed more steady. So the solution here is to bag the warm-up? Well, not exactly. A warm-up is still beneficial, but you may need to employ some special tactics in order to keep cool. For example, in this study on the effect of cooling vests on 5K performance, they took competitive runners and had them run two 5Ks at 32 degrees Celsius, one while wearing just a t-shirt during the warm-up, and one while wearing an ice vest during the warm-up. What they found was that the 5K run time was significantly lower by 13 seconds when subjects wore the ice vest with a faster pace, most evident during the last two thirds of the run. In hot conditions, you may want to do a slightly shorter warm-up to not let your body temperature rise quite as much before your race or workout. Staying cool using ice vests, dousing yourself with cold water, or filling a sock with ice and putting it on the back of your neck can be helpful too. If conditions are cool, remember that the main reason you're doing your warm-up is to warm yourself up. So help yourself out by being well dressed and wait as long as possible before you take your jacket and knee warmers off on the starting line. Now let's talk about stretching. Many people include some sort of stretching as part of their warm-up routine, and if you look around at the starting line of any cycling event, you'll probably see quite a few people doing the old quad stretch. Is this actually doing anything for you, or even worse, could it be hurting your performance? This study on stretching's effects on cycling efficiency had subjects perform tests at 85% of VO2 max until exhaustion, with and without pre-exercise stretching. The results showed that stretching before the test actually decreased time to exhaustion. They concluded that a preceding stretching routine significantly decreases exercise efficiency and time to exhaustion during heavy intensity. That's interesting, and goes against everything my gym teacher taught me. What could be the reason for this? The study explains that stretching changes the viscoelastic properties of the muscle tendon unit by decreasing its stiffness, and that a relatively stiffer muscle tendon unit reportedly has a greater capacity for force production, owing to improved force velocity and length tension relationships, and to a better initial transmission of force. Basically, a stiffer muscle can produce more force, and stretching reduces the stiffness of the muscle, thereby reducing the amount of force the muscle can produce. As always, though, we don't want to rely on just one study when coming to its conclusion. This 2012 meta-analysis looked at 104 different studies, and came to the conclusion that results clearly show that static stretching before exercise has significant and practically relevant negative acute effects on maximal muscle strength and explosive muscular performance, and these findings are universal, regardless of subjects age, gender, or training status. The advice here, although somewhat surprising, is simple. Do not stretch before a hard workout or race. At best, it won't help you, but more likely than not, it may actually hurt your performance. Finally, let's discuss what a proper warm-up should look like and what kinds of cycling events you do and do not want to warm up for. A warm-up doesn't need to be long. In fact, it's probably better if it isn't. At most, you want 30 minutes, but most of the time, 20 minutes should be sufficient. A warm-up also doesn't have to be complicated with ramp-ups and multiple sprint efforts. Keep most of your warm-up at zone 2 endurance pace, and then do 1 or 2 opener efforts, not 4 or 5. These efforts should be relatively short at 30 seconds to 2 minutes, and you should give a good solid effort, but not be near max pace. Do these based on feel. As far as what kinds of events you do and do not want to warm up for, in general, the shorter the event, the more important the warm-up becomes. For short races like short track mountain biking or crit road racing or cyclocross racing, a warm-up is extremely important and can have a huge impact on your performance. For races like these, you want to make sure that you get to the event with plenty of time to get ready and warm up, and you also want to be sitting on the starting line, not warming up for as little time as possible. I know that's easier said than done. This goes for short high-intensity rides too. A warm-up is important for making sure that you get the most out of that workout. For longer events, you can shorten your warm-up, and for ultra endurance events, you may actually be better off not warming up at all. This is because a huge limiting factor at events like these is your glycogen levels or amount of stored carbohydrates. You are depleting these levels during the warm-up, even if it's just a little bit of depletion, you're going to want as much glycogen as possible for the event. However, the biggest factor to determine whether or not you should be warming up before a longer event is how hard the start is going to be. The harder the start of the races, and the more important the start is, the more important the warm-up becomes. Dude, you skipped over my advice. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like. If you want to stay up to date on my training and racing, be sure to follow me on Instagram. I also announce when I post new videos on there. And finally, if you haven't subscribed yet, be sure to do that. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next one.