Stretching is exercise, but warming up is preparation for the dance floor or playing field. In many ways, warming up helps you both execute the splits and other ballet techniques and avoid risks of injuries.
Warm-up as Preparation for Physical Performance
It doesn’t matter how flexible you are or how ready you are at the dance stage. If you do not prepare your body for the tasks ahead, you are putting yourself in for injury. It is an unwritten law that athletes, dancers and casual exercisers warm up before exercising and going to the dance floor or playing field.
Exercises shape our body for a specific task or technique, but warm-ups prepare our body for it. It is also essential that we warm up before we exercise or stretch. In other words, the safety and success of our exercise and dance will depend on our warm-up.
What Constitute A Good Warm-up?
A warm-up is a group of exercises performed before a physical activity that provides your body a period of adjustment from rest to exercise. It aims to improve our physical performance and reduce the risk of injury by preparing the athlete or dancer physically as well as mentally. It also provides you focus in what you are about to do in your routine.
What are the benefits of a good warm-up?
· Increases the elasticity of the muscle/tendon unit – Warming up helps increase blood circulation to your muscles, thus releasing more oxygen to your muscles and removing carbon dioxide. This process helps raise the temperature of the muscle fibres to make them more flexible. Aside from preventing injuries, warming up before stretching helps increase your muscles’ elasticity and the range of motion of your muscles, ligaments, tendons and other connective tissues.
· Improves breathing – You breathe in more oxygen and breathe out more carbon dioxide faster and deeper.
· Elevates your heart rate – Aside from delivering more oxygen and glucose (sugar) to the muscles to produce energy, it gets your heart rate to a healthy rate for beginning exercises. When you warm up, you prepare your cardiovascular system to work and help in the distribution of blood.
· Increases body temperature – By increasing your body temperature, you improve your performance. A high body temperature helps increase energy release.
· Facilitates efficient nerve transmission – from increasing the body temperature and heart rate, a good warm-up also increases the velocity of nerve conduction to allow physical movement and quicker and smoother muscle contraction and relaxation.
· Improves your proprioception (your body's ability to sense movement within the joints and joint position) – This is an important thing when you learn the splits. Warming up helps you perform physical movements with incredible skill and greater accuracy.
· Provides you greater focus – It helps you prepare for the activity or exercise and keeps your mind away from distraction. Splitting is not going to be easy, so you need concentration when you learn the splits.
Any straining or stressful physical activity like exercise, stretches and how to learn the splits demand the most of your body and mind. So before you would engage yourself physically, you must warm up to prepare yourself mentally for the run. A warm-up is a mental conditioning to improve your physical activities.
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