The warm up activities are a crucial part of any exercise regime or sports training. The importance of a structured warm up routine should not be under estimated when it comes to the prevention of sports injury. A solid warm up routine will go a long way in keeping your body in top condition and will help you avoid serious injury further down the road.

Warm up activities include a number of very important key elements. These elements, or parts, should all be working together to minimize the likelihood of sports injury from physical activity.

Warming up prior to any physical activity does a number of beneficial things, but primarily its main purpose is to prepare the body and mind for more strenuous activity. One of the ways it achieves this is by helping to increase the body's core temperature, while also increasing the body's muscle temperature. By increasing muscle temperature you're helping to make the muscles loose, supple and pliable.

Effective warm up activities also have the effect of increasing both your heart rate and your respiratory rate. This increases blood flow, which in turn increases the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the working muscles. All this helps to prepare the muscles, tendons and joints for more strenuous activity.

Keeping in mind the aims or goals of effective warm up activities, we can then go on to look at the structure of the warm up itself.

Obviously, it's important to start with the easiest and most gentle activity first, building upon each part with more energetic activities, until the body is at a physical and mental peak. This is the state in which the body is most prepared for the physical activity to come, and where the likelihood of sports injury has been minimized as much as possible. So, how should you structure your warm up to achieve these goals?

There are four key elements, or parts, which should be included to ensure an effective and complete warm up. They are: 

All four parts are equally important and any one part should not be neglected or thought of as not necessary. All four elements work together to bring the body and mind to a physical peak, ensuring the athlete is prepared for the activity to come. This process will help ensure the athlete has a minimal risk of sports injury.

Of course this is a very simplistic view of proper warm up activities. Each element has specific requirements of its own. Only by combining these elements in the right way will you achieve the maximum results for your efforts. In part two, we’ll take a closer look at the proper procedure for warming up and each of the individual steps in detail.

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