New research suggests everything we’ve been warming up to exercise for has been wrong

The results are amazing, with just a few tweaks to your warm-up routine improving your mile time by 2-3%. That’s the key finding of a new study that tested the effects of a “cognitive warm-up combined with a physical warm-up” that softens both bodies. and Be careful before exercising. Will this be the magical new warm-up style that takes the world by storm? I’m not sure, but I think the results tell us something important about what a proper warm-up does (and doesn’t) do.

What we learned from the research

A research team led by Hannah Mortimer from the University of Birmingham in the UK recruited 25 recreational runners to run three consecutive one-mile time trials. Although they were experienced, they were not elite runners, with an average best mile time of 6:47 and an average best 5K time of 23:31, and they were training about 20 miles a week. The result is European Journal of Sports Science.

The three time trials were identical except for the warm-up. In each case, they did a physical warm-up consisting of a 1,200-meter jog, followed by four 100-meter strides, and several minutes of drills such as lunges and high knees. We added a cognitive component to the warm-up before the two exams. They performed 3 minutes of cognitive exercise before jogging, strides, and drills for a total of 9 minutes.

Cognitive exercises were performed with a phone app called SOMA-NPT, which provides a series of cognitive tasks. The tasks assigned to them taxed cognitive functions such as task switching, memory updating, response inhibition, cognitive interference, and decision making. Remarkably, these same tasks have been used in studies of mental fatigue. harm performance. If you do these for, say, 30 minutes, your brain will feel exhausted and (according to some, but not all, interpretations of the data) your performance on endurance tasks will decrease.

On the other hand, these short-duration tasks are intended to act as “priming.” That means it probably gets blood flowing to the brain, induces a flow state, or has other yet-to-be-determined benefits. To be honest, the basis for this is not entirely clear. But the results were that the runners were faster after the cognitive warm-up. There were actually two versions of the cognitive warm-up, one easier and one more difficult, but with essentially the same benefits.

Of course, the biggest result is mile time. Runners were 8 seconds (2.0 percent) faster after the easier cognitive warm-up and 11 seconds (2.8 percent) faster after the more difficult warm-up compared to the physical-only warm-up. This is a big problem. People pay a lot of money for fancy shoes and custom-made supplements, which are almost always less effective. Inevitably, I am reminded of David Epstein’s second law of news statistics. “Small interventions rarely have big effects.” You should always be very wary when “this strange trick” promises to change your life.

Are these findings reliable?

My first assumption when I see a result like this is that it’s a fluke. If you conduct a study and measure a large number of outcomes, it just so happens that one or two of them will show a significant change. However, in this case, Mortimer and her colleagues measured a number of outcomes. all They seem to be facing the same direction. That’s more interesting.

Here are two examples: Assessment of perceived momentum. This is a subjective feeling of how hard a mile was (measured and averaged after each lap). Average heart rate during 1 mile.

After the cognitive warm-up (labeled here as “compound low” and “compound high”), runners not only felt faster, but also slightly easier, and their heart rates were much lower at 7 to 8 beats per minute. Cognitive warm-up is starting to look like magic.

There is one more graph that I think is important. This is a self-reported assessment of readiness on a scale of 1 to 10 immediately before a time trial.

This is the biggest and most obvious difference between the conditions. After a cognitive warm-up, the runners exerted force on the bit and were ready to run.

First of all, what is a warm-up for?

I’ve written about the science of warming up many times over the years, with the hope that understanding the purpose of a warm-up will help you optimize your own routine. There are many theoretical Information about the effectiveness of warming up. Mainly associated with benefits from increased body temperature. This means increased blood flow, decreased stiffness, faster metabolic responses, and increased nerve conduction velocity.

However, studies that focus directly on performance tend to produce underwhelming results, at least for endurance events (jumps and sprints are different). One study I wrote compared two fancy warm-up protocols…but neither improved performance compared to a control condition of no warm-up at all. Still, athletes, including myself, swear by the importance of warming up.

Another study published in 2024 offers a hint. Researchers in Italy had volunteers perform a running test to exhaustion under three different conditions: After doing some fancy drills for FIFA11+ warm-up protocols in addition to regular warm-ups. After the same normal warm-up and FIFA11+ warm-up. They were told it would improve their performance. Sure enough, fancy warm-ups themselves didn’t improve performance, but when runners were told they helped, they did. It was a warm-up effect of the placebo.

Let’s pause here for a moment to note that there is solid evidence that warming up in FIFA11+ reduces injuries in soccer players by about 30%. That’s a big deal. While it is unlikely that endurance activities will have exactly the same injury prevention benefits, it is an important reminder that the benefits of warming up may extend beyond what can be measured with immediate performance tests.

When it comes to the benefits of cognitive warm-up, we find that the effects are essentially the same for the easy and difficult versions with relative intensities set at 20 and 70 percent. This is consistent with the idea that the most important effect is to give participants a sense of having done something great that will help their subsequent performance, as reflected in their very high readiness scores. Maybe it’s somehow changing the state of your nervous system, producing lower heart rates and other benefits.

Alternatively, there may actually be a cognitive priming effect specific to the cognitive task they performed. It’s impossible to know in either case without further investigation. But I think this study, and others like the earlier Italian study, point to an important new direction for warm-up research: understanding how to get athletes into the right state of mind. If it’s possible to use a phone app to keep me focused and away from the pain that’s about to come, I’m open to the idea.

If you want to know more about the science of sweat, Mail magazine and check out my new book The explorer gene: Why we seek big challenges, new flavors, and blank spaces on the map.