should i do a cooldown after exercise?

You are probably thinking what a stupid question. Of course you should do a cool down. We all should. It’s what we have learnt since we first started exercising. And it’s important. Isn’t it?

When I played school football (and played very poorly I might add) we always did a cool down. At tennis we did a cool down. After a run. After a bike ride. After a gym workout. Always. It’s because a cool down, um… stops you getting sore after exercise I think. No, it’s um…because you won’t get tight short muscles and they will cool down in a relaxed state or something. No that’s not it, I think it’s because we need to get the lactic acid out isn’t it? Look, we just have to do a cool down that’s all.

You may be very surprised to know that the literature behind doing a cool down after exercise or sports is next to zero! The research on the benefits is pretty much non existent. We have machines in the gym that have ‘cool down phases’ at the end of the exercise. But here’s the thing. The problem, says Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas, Austin, is that there is pretty much no science behind the cool-down advice.

The cool-down, Dr. Tanaka said, “is an understudied topic.”

”Everyone thinks it’s an established fact,” he added, “so they don’t study it.”

However, most people are not even clear on what a cool down should be. Is it stretching? Or doing the same exercise but more slowly? Or is it a walk from the gym to get into your car?

There is only one particular fact that exercise researchers agree on in regards to the benefits of a cool down. If you exercise really intensely, the blood vessels in your legs expand to send more blood to your legs and feet and your heart is beating very fast. If you stop all of a sudden, your heart slows down and your blood is pooled in your legs and feet. This can cause you to feel dizzy or even pass out.

The elite athletes are at most risk says Dr Paul Thompson, a cardiologist at the Hartford hospital in Connecticut.

“If you are well trained, your heart rate is slow already, and it slows down even faster with exercise,” he said. “Also, there are bigger veins with a large capacity to pool blood in your legs.”

According to Carl Foster, an exercise physiologist at the University of Wisconsin,

This effect can also be problematic for someone with coronary disease, because blood vessels leading to the heart are already constricted which makes it difficult for blood to get in. “That’s always a concern,” Dr. Foster said. “But to my knowledge there is not a wealth of experimental data.”

Ok, well that’s for your highly trained elite athletes. But what about your average Joe who pays some sports, a bit of tennis maybe, goes to the gym and does his workout.

“Probably not a great deal,” Dr. Thompson said. And moreover, people don’t just exercise and then stand in the one spot. They walk around to get to the locker room, or to get to their cars or even to the next machine. This is a cool down in a sense.

The whole idea of a cool down originated from the thought that if you didn’t do it, lactic acid would stay in your muscles and leave you sore afterwards. We now know that to be completely wrong. In fact it is actually good to have lactic acid in your muscles because it’s a fuel. There was a study of cyclists done where the conclusion was made that it was better not to cool down because the lactic acid was changed back into glycogen, a fuel for the muscles, when they just stopped however, when they cooled down it was wasted. It was used up to fuel their muscles.

The muscle soreness theory also has no justification either. There is no physiological basis for it. There was a South African study done where they had 52 people walk backwards downhill on a walking machine for 20 minutes to induce muscle soreness. Half the group did cool downs and the others didn’t. There was no difference in the muscle soreness between the two groups.

And muscle tightness? There is also absolutely no evidence that this reduces muscle tightness.

“In a different generation we would have called it an old wives’ tale,” Dr. Foster said. “Now I guess I’d call it an old physiologists’ tale. There are no data to support the idea that a cool-down helps.” But, he added, once again, “It’s an idea we can’t get rid of.”

As far as Dr Thompson is concerned, if he does a really intense track workout he will do a small jog just to avoid the possibility of getting dizzy afterwards. As far as Dr Tanaka is concerned, when he plays his weekly soccer match he doesn’t bother to cool down at all. According to Dr Tanaka, he sees no point in doing anything after his game other than just to stop.

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