Warmup and cooldown
One common thing about sports noobs1 is that they don’t warm up before and cool down after an exercise. They might be convinced that it is not necessary, and they also don’t know how to do it properly. They might complain from prolonged injuries, like joint pain.
The thing about serious exercise, be it strength training, running, stretching, and so on, is that you are pushing your body beyond its limits. This is called overload. If you do this over a long term period, it is called progressive overload. This is what gives you real power, real speed, ability to do middle splits, and so on.
When you start with an intention to do serious exercise, and you immediately start loading heavily without warming up, you will get injured very quickly and have to take days or weeks of break.
For example, if you directly jump at the heaviest dumbbells you can lift and start doing bicep curls the moment you get to the gym, you will destroy your wrists, elbows, and/or shoulders. You will not realize it immediately. After a few weeks or months, you will start feeling pain, and will have to stop training altogether.
A common thing about noobs who injure themselves early on is that they have fierce willpower, but they don’t listen to their bodies, and they don’t have a good understanding of their current capabilities. They have an idea of where they want to be, and they are prepared to push towards it. But because they are impatient, don’t have good mind-body connection, and don’t know how to plan for long-term progress, they push themselves too far too fast.2
Being able to sustain injury-free long-term practice is a skill in itself, and perhaps the most underrated among non-professional gym-goers and athletes. There is no fancy Latin/Greek name for it, like there is for other things like cardio, plyometrics, hypertrophy, and so on. A crucial idea is missing from mainstream fitness.
Therefore, I coin the term and define it here:
Parathletics: The practices that let you successfully sustain injury-free long-term practice of a physical activity.
The word comes from Greek παρά (para-) meaning “beside/alongside” and ἀθλητικός (athlētikós) meaning “athletic”, “relating to an athlete”3.
Two main parathletic practices are warmup and cooldown.
Before starting a workout, warm up your body by moving your every joint, from the neck to the toes, through its range of motion and increase the blood flow to your muscles. If you plan to do heavy loads, build up to them with lighter weights first.
After finishing a workout, cool down your body by stretching every joint and muscle group, and especially the ones you just trained. The more hardcore your workout, the more you need to stretch.
Skipping these will result in injury, decrease in mobility, and delay in reaching your goals.
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Including me before I started to receive proper training. ↩
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Me running in 2017. I tried to lower my pace below 5:00 per km too quickly, less than a year after I started running. I had to stop because my heart fatigued for 2-3 days after running, with increased troponin levels in my blood. I never got serious about running since then. ↩
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Which eventually comes from ἆθλος (âthlos) which was used to mean “contest”, “prize”, “game”, “struggle” and similar things. ↩