Essentia Fitness: Stretch Out Before You Break Out!

It may be getting cooler outside, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your outside workouts.

We caught up with an Essentia Health Fitness expert to give us the most important piece of advice before you start your workout.

DIANE THAO: I’m here with Essentia Health Athletic Trainer Allison Kucera who’s here with me why it’s so important to stretch before an exercise. So Allison tell me, why is it so important to stretch before working out?
 
ALLISON KUCERA: The main reason why it’s so important to stretch before working out is to warm-up your muscles and get your body prepared for doing an exercise. To hopefully prevent a lot of injuries.”

DT: So what are some good stretches that you guys do?

AK: So as an athletic trainer we typically have our athletes go through what are called dynamic stretching and dynamic warm-ups. A couple of differences. But the first one we can talk about is dynamic stretching. Dynamic stretching is basically you’re just moving through the stretch instead of just sitting on the ground and holding a stretch. So we’re just making the movement that our body is going to be doing once we start the exercise.

DT: Once we’re done the dynamic stretching you had mentioned dynamic warm-up. Tell me more about that.

AK: Dynamic warm up is just an extra part of the warm-up routine to increase our heart rate while also warming up our muscles through our whole body. Some of the dynamic warm ups that we have our athletes do may include butt kickers, high knees, carioca some squatting. Depending on your comfort level some of the other dynamic warm-ups you can do is jump rope, a brisk walk or a light jog.

DT: Are these warm ups something that will get your heart racing?

AK: Yup, you want to be sweating after you are done with your workout. So if you’re not sweating, you’re not quite ready to start your workout. Usually it can take between 10-15 minutes maybe more if you’re going to be working out for an hour or two.

DT: So make sure to get some sweat in before your workouts then?

AK: Yes, definitely.

Tomorrow on KVRR Local News at 9, we will bring you what Allison says we should be doing after our workouts to get the best possible results.