When discovering the joy of running or exercising for the first time, the tendency is to begin each run the same way you mean to continue it, and perhaps even get carried away with yourself if the opening stages. However, gradually one learns the importance of having a proper warm-up schedule either the easy way (by listening to older and wiser heads) or the hard way (getting injured!)

Warming up has important benefits on both the physical and mental level. Your car can't go from neutral to top gear all at once, and it's the exact same with your body. We have all broken things by pushing or pulling them too hard; similarly a sudden movement of your body from rest to full flow can place tremendous strain on yourself. Many people who start off at full pace complain of feeling like they're lugging a dead elephant around the place; that's their body trying to tell them something.

Which brings us to the mental aspect: warming up can also make the training a much more enjoyable experience. Invariably, an exercise warm-up schedule will include doing the excise at a much slower pace - for example if you were planning to do some tempo running, you would first start off at jogging pace for ten minutes or so. This means the initial stiffness can be eased out of your body at a much more comfortable pace. Even when you begin doing the real thing, it is best if you start into it at an intensity slightly below that which you've planned and then work your way up. This is much more fun than doing it the other way around - starting off very fast and having to slow down near the end. Tarit Adrian Stott, former UK national ultrarunner and Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team member, puts it very succinctly: "Speed work should be a little taxing on the body, but it wasn’t designed to propel you into oblivion or injury. Don’t kid yourself out of harder training, but be prepared for warning signs of dizziness or slight pains etc and ease back or just jog the remainder of the session."

The other thing to bear in mind about warming up is that it need not be a very complicated matter: 10 minutes of low-intensity exercise followed some stretching of the relevant parts of the body should do the trick. For running, low intensity can mean starting out at little better than walking pace, although if you are planning to do some blistering speedwork then it might be a good idea to increase the pace gradually during the duration of your warm-up. It is much better if the stretches you do are of the dynamic kind (which involve moving or swinging of your body) rather than the static kind (the kind we're all used to). If you do do static stretches, keep them light. Sometimes the extra time a warm-up takes creates a mental block which causes people to think perhaps they can do without it, but you can easily work it into your schedule, especially if you are running: just pick a place to do your training ten minutes from where you live, and do your warm-up by jogging there!

Resources:
You can read the rest of Tarit's marathon tips on the Sri Chinmoy Races UK website...