Improve your next race with your warm up.
A good warm-up should prepare your body for the specific demands of the session or race ahead. For runners and cyclists, that means more than simply jogging or spinning easily for a few minutes. The best warm-up depends on whether you are doing an easy session, intervals, a 5K race, a time trial or another key effort. This article explains how to structure your warm-up before leaving the house, how to progress it once you start running or riding, and why practising your race-day warm-up in training can improve how ready you feel when the hard effort begins.
Strength training for runners and cyclists over 30 is a game-changer for performance, resilience, and long-term health.
If you want the full breakdown, check out my Strength Training Over 30 Guides:
TRAINING BREAKDOWN
"If you're racing park run to try and get a PB, competing in a 10 mile TT or starting a key testing session, there is no time to settle into the effort, it’s guns blazing from the get go."
By Emma O'Toole
Hi there,
How much thought do you honestly give to your warm up?
We spend a lot of time planning out our training sessions. We know the pace we want to run, the power we want to ride at, what heart rate we should hold, how many intervals we have to do, how long the recovery between them should be, so on and so forth, but our warm ups don’t get the same attention to detail.
For some of us, our warm up is quite literally running out of the front door or spinning easily for a few minutes before suddenly asking the legs to produce 105% FTP.
If that sounds familiar, I want you to think about how different your life and training might look now compared to 10-20 years ago. You might spend more time sitting at a desk. You may have children, a more demanding job or other commitments competing for your time.
Your training might happen at 5am before everyone wakes up, during a gap between meetings, or immediately after spending an hour sitting in the car.
Your training history is likely different too. Another 10-20+ years of running or cycling means another 10-20+ years of training, races, previous injuries and niggles that can influence how you feel when you start moving.
As we get older, maintaining muscle mass, strength and power also becomes increasingly
important, (this is why strength training is vital). Add work, family, sleep and your training into the mix, your warm up needs a bit more consideration than it did 15 years ago.
I’m a bit like a dog with a bone on this one because you can absolutely still train hard and chase big performance goals in your 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond (I know because I have the pleasure of seeing coached athletes do so week in and week out!).
Rob experienced the benefits of a solid warm up recently and shared this in our free coaching community that':
“I walked the course before hand to stretch my legs and warm them up a little. It also gave me chance to measure the lap (1.5km). After the walk, I then did my usual stretch routine. I think this helped a lot. The first km felt much smoother than usual. After a steady start, everything felt good so I gradually built the pace up to finish strongly.”
When we think about a warm up, we’re thinking about “preparing”. Increasing our body temperature, raising our heart rate, moving through different ranges of motion… basically “preparing” for what lies ahead. That’s why I like to split the warm up into two parts:
1. What you do before you leave the house.
2. What you do once your run or ride has started and how this differs depending on the run/ride you have planned.
1. What you do before you leave the house
Think about what your body has been doing during the hour, or even the eight hours, before you start training.
If you train first thing in the morning, you might be going from lying in bed to running/riding within 30 to 60 minutes. If you train after work, there is a good chance you have spent much of the day sitting at a desk, driving or moving very little before changing into your training kit and heading outside.
This is where a short warm up before leaving the house can be useful, especially if you know you tend to feel stiff during the first part of your sessions.
I am talking about a few minutes of dynamic movement here. Things like hip openers, squats, bridges, low-level plyometrics etc. I also like this because it gives you an opportunity to check in with your body before you start training, rather than finding out five minutes into the session. Eg. how do my quads feel today? Does anything feel different from normal?
You are gathering useful information before you have even started your watch, and you can use that information to then decide how you approach your session. This does not need to become another 20 or 30-minute routine that you somehow have to magically squeeze into your already busy day. For many of us, 5-10 mins on this is plenty.
2. Warming up for what you’re about to do
Once you start running or riding, your warm up should match the demands of the session ahead.
If you are going for a base run, the first mile or two can form part of your warm up. Start easily, allow your body to settle and gradually find your target effort. The same applies to a base ride, where the first 10-20 minutes can build progressively rather than spike to a specific, higher power target.
Now, if you have a workout or key session on your training plan, now we need to think about our warm up more.
Let's say you have 6 x 1km at 5k pace.
You could run 2 miles easy before starting your first rep as you would do on any other run, or you could use those 2 miles to gradually progress up to feeling what that 5k pace feels like for a short period of time and then add in some strides.
Same for cyclists with a Vo2 max session, rather than riding 10-15 minutes easy and then hitting the intervals add in a few short efforts into your warm up with a focus on your cadence.
A lack of a solid warm up can be one reason why runners and cyclists find their first interval to be one of the most challenging and they have that notion of “they get better as I go through the workout”.
Race day and key sessions
If you're racing park run to try and get a PB, competing in a 10 mile TT or starting a key testing session, there is no time to settle into the effort, it’s guns blazing from the get go.
There has been some interesting research around higher-intensity warm ups, where in one study, following a higher-intensity warm up, the participants ran 5km an average of 6.4 seconds faster, with 10 of the 13 runners producing a quicker time. Worth remembering with any research paper you read is to look at the sample population, (the linked study was on well-trained, male athletes and had a small sample size). And another interesting review on “How Priming Exercise Affects Oxygen Uptake Kinetics.”
Just like with your training, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to your warm ups either. Your warm up needs to consider: the race/session you’re doing and how you respond to harder efforts before you start.
This is also why you should practise your race warm up during key sessions in your training, eg. before a 20 minute threshold effort, rather than deciding what to do on race morning. Pay attention to what happens when the harder work begins, eg. how quickly do you settle into your target pace or power? How do the first few minutes feel? Do you feel ready to work hard, and can you still produce the performance you want?
You can then use this as feedback to adjust the intensity, duration and recovery until you find an approach that works for you.
When I rode the British Cycling National Masters TT Championships last month, here’s the warm up I completed.
As you can see it has two ramp efforts with 2x short sprint efforts. I started that race feeling primed and ready to go - this is a standard TT warm up for me.
If you're now thinking, "Ok Emma, what should I actually do in each of these scenarios?", look no further!
This week I'm sharing 2x free warm ups for runners and cyclists over 30 in my free coaching community.
1. Pre-run/ride warm up to use before you leave the house.
2. Race and key-effort warm up for when you want to be as ready as possible to perform.
Both are free when you join the community, alongside the other resources already being used by 900+ runners and cyclists over 30.
How are you warming up before your running and cycling and does that change depending on what you have on your training plan? Get in touch and let me know!
Happy running and riding!
Emma x
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Really useful, thanks Emma will be looking forward to getting the warms ups in the group!