I hate warming up.
Okay, maybe I don’t always hate it, but I warm up for nearly every climbing session with at the very least a vague sense of impatience. I want to get straight to the good stuff, pushing my body to do moves and sequences that truly challenge me physically, and I want my body to be ready to do that instantly…but that’s just not how bodies work. Shirk on the warm-up, and at best, you won’t perform optimally in that day’s training session or climbing effort. At worst, you’ll walk away with an injury that could have been easily avoided simply by preceding your maximal efforts with a solid warm-up session.
Compared to actual performance or peak training time, warming up tends to be somewhat boring, I think. I find it particularly dull when I’m faced with warming up at a crag where I’ve climbed hundreds of times, and I’ve done all the warm-up routes hundreds of times. I honestly just don’t usually feel psyched to climb the same old routes over and over again, no matter how good they are. This is a good reason to establish an alternative warm-up protocol if this happens to be the case for you, too – but I’m getting ahead of myself here, and I’ll get that option later on. I have to complete my bellyaching about the boringness of warming up first.
I also find warming up not the most fun simply when I’m bouldering in the gym or working out with weights – because again, it’s sort of a waiting game with my body, trying to get it right and gauge when it’s ready to really start going. I want to like warming up, don’t get me wrong – and I’m diligent about doing it, and trying to do it right, of course. I try to keep a positive mindset about it, but to be totally honest, some part of me always feels annoyed that I can’t just start climbing or training and climb or train at 100 percent right off the couch (this is the same part of me that thinks it’s a cruel phenomenon that one hard day of climbing or training can sometimes require two or three days of little-to-no climbing or training in order to recover fully).
So, why do we need to warm up to perform at our peaks physically (and please, spare me the “so-and-so doesn’t ever warm-up and he climbs xx grade just fine;” just like all lame-assed excuses for doing stupid things (i.e. drinking heavily, never training weaknesses outside of climbing, not resting enough) related to rock climbing, the truth of the matter is that so-and-so is probably a genetically gifted freak to a certain extent who can get away with climbing relatively well compared to the rest of the world DESPITE the fact that he makes poor choices about how to treat his body; if he made better choices, he’d probably climb even better…but I digress; back to the topic at hand). The warm-up should be a crucial tactical weapon included in every climber’s training and performance arsenal, because it enables you to take advantage of your body’s full capabilities both physically and mentally.
Warming up has the following potential physiological impacts:
- Increases the body’s core temperature and muscle temperature;
- Increases blood flow and therefore nutrient and oxygen transport to muscles;
- Increases the body’s ability to transport waste products away from muscles;
- Increases muscular plasticity, making muscles more stretchable and pliable and able to utilize their full range of motion and power/strength/speed potential;
- Decreases the risk of injury, as more elastic muscles are less likely to get injured;
- Enhances neuromuscular pathways, making for quicker responses and reaction times (ever feel “fuzzy” or like your climbing brain isn’t quite in synch when you first start climbing, and then feel sharper and sharper as you warm up? This is why…); and
- Reduces rates of injury.
A good way to think about it is that warming up is sort of like melting a stick of butter – everything in your body becomes more fluid, smooth and efficient as you warm up. But, just like melting a stick of butter, it takes time to render the whole entity liquid, and if you do too much too quickly, you might end up burned instead of flowing and ready to move at peak levels.
Tomorrow, I’ll continue this discussion, sharing how to warm-up properly for climbing or a climbing training workout.
