Do Exercise Tips about the Value of a Cooldown after a Workout Really Work?

We’ve all heard it, one of the most important exhortation that exercise manuals give you tends to be about the cooldown rule. Physiology books and fitness manuals will devote entire chapters to it, and computerized home gym equipment will actually include cooldown phases in their programming. To devotees of this exercise philosophy, at the end of any serious run of exercise, you can’t just go and sit down at the end; you need to allow the body to wind down with several minutes of gentler exercise.

 This is kind of funny, considering that there is no real scientific thinking that backs it up. Cooling down is just what the gut instinct says is right. There is no scientific research that has gone into it. No one even knows what exactly a cooldown is supposed to consist of. Some people say that you just need to continue doing the same thing you were doing, only more slowly. If you are running, you need to jog, and then you need to walk before you stop. Some fitness magazines have exercise tips that recommend that you are to always include a stretching session in your cooldown. So what do you do?

 Read more on this topic here…