020: The Importance of Warming Up Before You Ride

WARM-UP PROCEDURES

Fear of looking like a numpty, not having much space and not wanting to get those white jods dirty are a few reasons riders may pass of a warm up, but its at this point I ask you… how serious are you about your performance?

The acronym RAMP can be used to assist in the effective design of a warm up, these letters stand for:

1. Raise
2. Activate and Mobilise
3. Potentiate

Raise

The aim of the ‘raise’ section is to increase body temperature, heart rate, respiration rate, blood flow and join viscosity.

• ↑ Body temperature
• ↑ Heart rate
• ↑ Respiration rate
• ↑ Blood flow
• ↑ Joint viscosity

I am not suggesting that you go jogging round the competition arena, but some leg swings, body weight squats, lunges and high knees will do the trick nicely.

Activate and Mobilise

The title says it all really, here, we want to activate key muscle groups and ranges of motion used whilst riding, so we really need to unlock those hips and shoulders and activate the glutes, core and scapular stabilisers. This might include band work, self myofascial release and foam rolling, lunges and squats, balance work etc.

When designing the activation and mobilisation phase, its important that you consider firstly where you as an individual are limited in movement or tight and secondly what motion is required for your discipline. This will allow your coach to be very specific with the movements/exercises selected for the warm-up, and therefore have the best possible chance to effectively prepare you for training or competition and preventing you from injury.

 Potentiation 

This is where you get activated and primed, switch on the reaction time and work on hand eye co-ordination and reactive stability. Here the aim is to bring you up to an intensity you are about to work in and excite your muscle tissue ready for action. Now we are not sprinting or olympic lifting here and so we don’t need masses of dynamic potentiation (jumping etc)

But don’t under estimate the power of a few squat jumps for activating that core, remember the core has to counteract and work isometrically on the landing of a jump and is exactly what you need when you ride, so yeah, a few bouncy bouncy moments before you get on might actually be a good thing!!

STRETCHING

My advice? Do not static stretch before you ride. There has been a large amount of debate on this topic but there is limited evidence based information that concludes it has any benefit and in-fact more recently there is suggestion that it actually decreases performance and increases risk of injury!

Dynamic stretching, however, has been consistently shown to improve subsequent performance ( think leg swings, back slaps etc) The neural stimulus is also activated through dynamic range of movement so this is the most appropriate form of mobilisation during warm ups.