Parts of our body especially our muscles need an adaptation of the activity that we do. When it comes to workout, Warm up or Stretching is one of the ways that we can do to prevent us from getting injured. Let’s elaborate the differences between warm up and stretching.
Warm up is an activity that we do before working out in order to prepare our body before doing physical activity, it aims to heating up our body temperature so that our body could adapt with the escalation of our workout intensity. Types of warm up that we can do is like push up, jumping, squat, or run in place. The right warm up will prepare us to do a better workout routine.
While on the other hand, stretching is a movement that we do to escalate our body flexibility like our back, feet, and hands. Unlike warm up, stretching does not really helps us to adapt when doing preparing our body before workout, it is to reach the limit of normal range of our body flexibility. Stretch up can be done with movement like split, touching the knees or toes.
Basically, stretching and warm up have a very different function to our body. Warm up are for preparing our body muscle to do an activity while stretching up makes our muscle become more relaxed. According to Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism doing a stretching before workout could hamper our performa to do a workout
So the conclusion is when we want to do our workout routine, the best way before is to do a warm up and the stretching after. Make sure we do our workout routine mindfully and wisely to make our workout optimal and prevent us from getting injured.