Cool Down Exercises and Stretches - Cools Down you Body after workouts

How to do Cool Down Exercises properly

Proper Cool Downs helps your body get back to pre-exercise levels, clears blood metabolites and helps faster recovery. Learn the best cool down exercises.

Cool Downs are crucial post weight training workouts as the warm muscle respond best to stretching. At the end of a high intensity weight training workout your blood tends to accumulate in your lower body { That is why you feel light headed after an intense workout especially after squats or dead lifts}.

This accumulated blood has to be re-circulated back to heart and lungs again for purification again. Not that this cannot happen by itself, but cool downs have proven to be very effective to get your body back to pre-exercise levels and faster recovery. Not to mention reduced muscle soreness.
 

Advantages of Cool Downs

Faster clearance of muscle metabolism byproducts and lactic acid.

Reduced incidence of Muscle Soreness.

Cool Downs help you switch your mind from exercise to other things post workout and even evaluate how your workout went.

How to cool down your body

The best way to cool down is to perform light cardio exercise and cool down stretches for about 5-10 minutes. Alternatively you can continue to do your workout exercises at lower intensities.

How to use Light Cardio to Cool down after Resistance Exercise

Resistance training is important for building muscle mass and for putting the body in a high state of metabolic activity that help to burn fat quicker than in most other exercise regimes.

In order to benefit most from your sessions of weight training, it is recommended that you use light cardio or stretching to start your exercise sessions and also that you finish your exercise sessions with them.

It is important to start your exercise session with light cardio because they prepare the muscles for the exercise session. Just hitting the gym and going straight away to start exercises will make the muscles predisposed to tears and other injury as the muscles may not be ready yet for the session. This is especially evident when we want to do exercises in the morning after waking up from sleep.

After training, it is important that we don’t just stop the exercise and walk out of the gym as well. It is recommended that we take a few minutes to bring the body back to normal before ending the exercise session.

When we exercise, there is build up of lactic acid in the muscles which may be dangerous if not eliminated. One of the ways this can be eliminated is by doing light aerobic exercise to help oxygen to get into the muscles that will help to eliminate the wastes from the muscles.

Tips on using cardio to cool down after resistance exercise

• After training, use about 5 minutes to jog lightly around while making sure to focus that you are breathing adequately to aerate your body.

• Instead of sitting down after the exercise, walk around and gradually while performing different stretches and breathing deeply to help the blood circulate and to help the oxygen get to every part of your body.

• Because resistance exercise will increase the metabolism of the body, your heart rate, and shortness of breath is an indication of how intensive your exercise period has been.

Using this as a guide, your light cardio should help in bringing you back to a normal state of breathing and heart rate. When you have achieved this, you can then end your exercise session.
 

NEXT - Stretching Exercises for a flexible body.

ExerciseGoals.com Recommends - The Stretching Handbook.

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