The Science of Warmups: Boosting Pole Dance Performance and Preventing Injury

Follow-along five minute pole warm up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GAP_7LDgo8

In this episode of Science of Slink, Dr. Rosy Boa delves into the importance of warmups for pole dancers. She explains that warming up is crucial for reducing injury and enhancing performance. The discussion covers the types of activities to include in a warmup, such as increasing body temperature, improving circulation, and moving joints through their range of motion. Dr. Boa also highlights the importance of psychological preparation. She advises against incorporating flexibility training into warmups, recommending that such exercises be done separately. The episode is filled with insights drawn from scientific studies and practical experiences, offering a comprehensive guide to effective warmups for pole athletes.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Warmups

00:33 The Purpose of Warmups

01:26 Evidence Supporting Warmups

03:18 Components of an Effective Warmup

06:13 Psychological and Neurological Preparation

10:04 Flexibility Training: What to Avoid

14:04 Conclusion and Final Tips

Citations:

Racinais S, Cocking S, Périard JD. Sports and environmental temperature: From warming-up to heating-up. Temperature (Austin). 2017 Aug 4;4(3):227-257. doi: 10.1080/23328940.2017.1356427. PMID: 28944269; PMCID: PMC5605167. 

 Safran, M. R., Garrett JR, W. E., Seaber, A. V., Glisson, R. R., & Ribbeck, B. M. (1988). The role of warmup in muscular injury prevention. The American journal of sports medicine, 16(2), 123-129.

Malliou, P., Rokka, S., Beneka, A., Mavridis, G., & Godolias, G. (2007). Reducing risk of injury due to warm up and cool down in dance aerobic instructors. Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation, 20(1), 29-35.

Barengo, N.C Meneses-Echávez, J.F., Ramírez-Vélez, R., Cohen, D.D., Tovar, G., & Bautista, J.E.C. (2014). The Impact of the FIFA 11+ Training Program on Injury Prevention in Football Players: A Systematic Review. 2015. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 11(11), pp.11986–12000. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25415209

Cramer, J. T., Housh, T. J., Weir, J. P., Johnson, G. O., Coburn, J. W., & Beck, T. W. (2005). The acute effects of static stretching on peak torque, mean power output, electromyography, and mechanomyography. European journal of applied physiology, 93, 530-539.

Transcript: 

Welcome to Science of Slink with me, Dr. Rosy Boa, your host. That's a, that's a science doctor and not a medical doctor. Today I wanna talk about something actually that someone brought up around the q and a episode that I thought deserved its own episode, and that is warming up.

What should we do in a warmup? How long does it need to be? Should we do it? Do we have any evidence that, you know, it actually is a thing we should do? Or is this one of those things that, like people started doing it at some point in the past and so we just kind of kept doing it. We're not actually sure if it helps anything or not.

Right. So a really, really good question and we're gonna get into it.

So we do a warmup for two main reasons. The first is to reduce injury and the second is to improve performance. And I will note here that there is a third thing that is not part of a warmup and that I do not recommend doing as part of a warmup, and that is flexibility training. So I would not recommend trying to increase your range of motion long term during your initial warmup. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But I know that for some folks there's a little bit of mental conflation there, especially because in pole one of the things that we need to do to prepare our body for getting on the pole is moving into a range of motion that is pretty wild for the general population, right?

The things you need to do, just basic pole movements are for, you know, if you just look at everyone, let's say in the us gonna be an ask for, for most folks.

So injury prevention, do we have good evidence that having a warmup actually reduces injuries? Yes, we do. There have been a number of studies done on this one that's particularly relevant to us as dancers actually looked at aerobic dance instructors.

So I am, eh, I don't know that I do aerobics, but like I'm, I'm kind of one of those. And this was by milieu et al in the Journal of VA and musculoskeletal, musculoskeletal rehabilitation from 2007 reducing the risk of injury due to warmup and cool down in dance aerobic instructors. And this, I should say, was not a, a randomized control study. This was a study where they were looking at this population of instructors and what they were doing in their classes, and then injury rates over time. So this was more of an ecological init study, and what they found was that. Injury's pretty common, right? It's just, yes, we know that people get hurt, right?

But the instructors who had at least 15 minutes of warmup and cool down during their classes had far lower injury rates than those who did not. I. And additional specific warmups done by the instructors around class help reduce that even further. So you know, if you are dancing and you're gonna be doing, making greater demands on your body than you do from just hanging around your day-to-day life, doing a warmup, and again, at least 15 minutes can really help to prepare your body and, you know, ecologically reduce his injury.

And we also have other studies on, on injury reduction as well. There's been quite a work done on. A lot of this work has been done on professional athletes. There's been quite a work quite a lot of work done on soccer, football for folks who are not from the us looking at that as well. So evidence overall pretty strong that some degree of preparation for movement, some degree of warmup does help produce injury.

Now, not all warmups are the same and not everything that we do in a warmup we do for the same purpose. So if we're looking to prepare our body for movement, the preparation that we are going to do needs to be specific for the movement that we do. But there are some things that are just sort of true across movement generally.

So one thing is that we do need to get physically warm. I. You know, if you were especially pole athletes, were usually training indoors in, you know, sort of a homeostatic sort of set temperature range. If you were training at extreme temperature ranges, particularly extreme heat, things may look a little bit different.

But if you are, you know, sort of in a, a indoor domicile at a comfortable human body human body temperature, the comfortable human living temperature, probably you're gonna need to get your body temperature up a little bit. And we do that by moving, right? So we do that by, you know, people will sometimes do something that's a little bit higher impact if you've ever had like jogging or skipping or jumping or anything like that.

For this part of the warmup, for me, I like to have folks freestyle for a full song keeping contact with the pole as they do, because then you also get a warmer pole, which again, just based on my experience, tends to be a little bit more sticky for most folks. And specifically what we're doing when we increase our body temperature, when we move, when we increase our circulation, when we bring our heart rate up.

One thing is that we're actually increasing the temperature in the muscles, right? And you may remember from chemistry generally when things are hotter, reactions happen faster, which is great 'cause we're trying to get the energy out. 'cause we're trying to move. You know, we see metabolic change.

We see circulatory change. In particular, this helps with, explosive performance, right? So the hotter the muscles are, the more you can sort of like do things like jumping. So if you're working on things like kis or I would, I wouldn't even argue, depending on how fast you climb, climbs, could count as an explosive muscle performance.

Improving metabolic and then contractile function, right? So it helps to increase your, your strength output if you are, if you are warmed up. I think anyone who's done done weightlifting and you've tried it with without a warmup has probably noticed a little bit of a difference there. Our nerves also conduct better when they're a little bit warmer.

And again, there's a ceiling on this, right? We talked about overheating and and heat exhaustion previously, but again, just sort of assuming the normal case. And also, you know, helps your body move better. So that's sort of on the circulatory side, that is on the the muscle side, musculoskeletal side.

We also want to warm up our joints. So not all of the joints in the body are synovial, but many of them are. And that means that there is, within the joint capsule itself, this synovial fluid. When we move through our joints, right, like our shoulder joint, great example, one of the things that we're doing is we're actually helping to warm and move around the synovial fluid. Those of you who have worked with me, you know, I, I will cue this during warmup. Yeah, I'll make sure that we go through all our major joints and move through them. We get better, you know, ease of movement increase in range of motion, and we are also increasing blood flow as well.

And another thing that we need to do is prepare ourselves psychologically and neurologically for the thing that we are doing. So a big part of my warmups so I teach freestyle all of my classes. All my classes, I would say have some degree of self-directed movement. And knowing how to do self-directed movement is a skill.

It's a thing that you have to learn how to do. So one of the things that we do in my warmup is I start with pretty structured scaffolding, right? So I start with pretty. You know, I'm, I choose your own adventure within it, but I give you something pretty concrete to play with. And then over the course of the warmup, I reduce that structure more and more and more as you become more comfortable deciding how your body's gonna move as you get into this freestyle space.

Right? So that is spill skill specific. Conditioning and warmup for self-directed movement for freestyle. And even folks, you know, I've taught a lot of people who have never freestyled before. And moving through a warmup in this way helps to ease them into that process in a way that's, you know, very safe, very limited.

We start on the floor and we're also doing sidebar, we'll come back to it. We're also doing pole type movements on the floor. But we start on the floor I've reduced the degrees of choice that you have about what you can do to help reduce that, that decision paralysis and help explore this freestyle dance component.

Coming back to that sidebar from earlier we also want to basically do easier versions of the things that we're gonna do later. So if you've, if you studied much psychology and you are familiar with the idea of priming basically this is a. If you have just done something, it is easier to do that thing again, right?

And so for those of you who freestyle a lot if you also work on tricks, you've probably noticed if you've been drilling a trick a lot, generally it shows up more often in your freestyle. Even if you're not consciously trying to do it, you have this thing that's already been activated once and it's easier to activate it again.

And this is just sort of a, a broad fact of how humans work, right? Psychologically and physically. And when we are working on things in our warmup, we want to be preparing ourselves to do a harder version of them later on, right? So  I structure my classes in such a way that when we are working on pole curriculum, we start with something that is an easier version of the thing that we are working towards and we slowly make our way towards it. And as people are like, yeah, this is the difficulty I wanna be working at today, this is the complexity I'm feeling they can sort of like peel off and work on the thing that's feeling most fun to them.

For whatever reason, right? You get to again, choose your own adventure. But part of the reason that I structure my classes that way, my, my pole pathways classes that way, is because it helps you to begin to work on that motor program. And then we're gonna do some variation in that repetition, right?

To help you build more robust idea of what it should be like. I'm not gonna get into what the primitives of motor learning are. And work on increasing complexity, work on increasing the strength requirements, the flexibility requirements, the proprioception requirements and also. In doing that, help to build your proprioception, your sense of where you are in space, help to build your interception, your sense of the feedback that you're getting from your body.

So all of these things are working together, right? We are. We're getting our body warmer, right? We're getting the blood flowing. We're having access to more energy. We're getting our joints lubricated. We're moving through a range of motion. We are. A, we're reminding our brain where our range of motion is, right?

We're building that mind body connection. And B, we're also lubricating the joints for greater range of mo, for not for, and we're also lubricating the joints for greater comfort, for greater ease and movement. You know, especially if as I get older, I notice more and more how much e more easily I can move after my warmup than before my warmup.

You may also be experiencing this. And we're also preparing our brain.

Now. Stretching. So in general, the recommendation for things like soccer, right? For things like running, things like bicycling sports that don't require a larger range of motion, the recommendation is not to do stretching during a warmup. We know that holding static stretches in particular is associated with a reduction in power acutely, right? Like for the next couple hours. If you really hold a static stretch for a long time, that muscle is stretched out. It's harder for it to contract quickly and you're gonna get less power.

That said. Especially if we are working into an extreme range of motion on the pole, which in a lot of cases we are, right? If you're working on a split based trick, you gotta work into those splits, right? If you are doing let's say a lot of movement with your arm overhead you gotta prepare to work in that range of motion, right?

And being able to lift your arm straight overhead without lifting your ribs is. It's a pretty big flexibility ask, right? That requires a lot of mobility. That requires a lot of strength. That requires a lot of range of motion if you're working on back bendy shapes. Even if you're working on something like just being in heels, right?

That's a fairly extreme position for the foot. If we look at just human movement in general at a general population level. So if you are gonna be working into that extreme range, you wanna make sure that you can be there in the first place. My general recommendation is to focus more on active stretching and isometrics at the end range. Because in, you know, in my reading, those seem to be associated more with reduction in injury.

But would I rather you did a passive just hanging out in your end range stretch for, for a little bit then nothing if you're gonna be working in a stream range of motion? Yeah, absolutely.

Is that my preference? Especially for my hypermobile folks? No, it is not.

Am I looking for you to try to actively increase your range of motion over time? Right. So doing flexibility training rather than to work from your cold range of motion into your warm range of motion during a warmup.

Absolutely not.

So flexibility training should be done separately. Right? That's why I have it as its own class. In my class rotation. I teach it on Thursdays. And we work on things specifically, right? So we are gonna do a warmup to help warm up the specific muscles that we're gonna be stretching. We work through exercise that are specifically designed to help you increase your range of motion, your active range of motion so that you can move your bodies into position, especially in the air, because we are not always doing things on the floor, and we don't always have the floor to push into us. And even if we do, sometimes we want to be able to control that range of motion.

Hmm. And also make sure that that range of motion is not coming. From movement of the tendons and the ligaments and stretching into the joints. Hypermobile folks, you know who you are. You know who you are, and instead make sure that that movement and that range of motion is coming from lengthening of the muscles themselves.

And that is a separate thing.

That should not be part of your warmup. It could potentially be part of your cool down, but flexibility training is very tiring. You know, again, folks who have worked with me know you all know flexibility training the feel good flex classes, they're not. Easy, right? They shouldn't be painful, they shouldn't be torturous, but they are work.

We are trying to adapt our nervous system in addition to our musculoskeletal system, and that is just a different thing than trying to learn a new pole trick.

And I have said this before, I'll say it again. Particularly for those of us who are working at home and or who are training alone, I would like you to be training pole tricks that are well within your physical capacity, that you already have more than enough flexibility for that.

You already have more than enough strength for that. You already have more than enough stamina for. Right.

so I've been working with Tran Finn as a handstand coach. Hi. And her recommendation is, you know, only do 75% of what you have capacity for and then come on down. Don't keep pushing past that. And that applies to your warmup as well, so.

To review all that. Why do we warm up to prevent injury, to prepare our body for movement and to increase our capacity and performance acutely right during our next session.

Another play thing that we're not doing in warmup is we're not trying to improve our cardiovascular endurance. During the warmup warmups should not leave you exhausted. They should leave you prepared.

And we're also not trying to increase our overall range of motion long term during the warmup. We're trying to move from our cold range of motion to our warm range of motion. We're trying to prepare psychologically, neurologically musculo, skeletally and you know, get into that space to do cool stuff on the pole without injuring ourself.

So that's why we warm up. That's what it needs to include, right?

It needs to include a psychological component, a musculoskeletal component, and a cardiovascular component. And not a flexibility training component and not a cardiovascular endurance component. And that's it, right? Hopefully this helps to answer answer your question, Chloe, 'cause I know you were one who asked about it. Great question. Thank you, by the way. I really appreciate it and helps give you a better idea of what should go into a warmup.

Oh, and I will say one final thing. I do have on my YouTube channel a five minute warmup for those of y'all who are like, I gotta get on the pole. And you just wanna get your heart rate up. You just wanna move through your joints and prepare yourself. It's very simple. Just follow along.

And I've included stuff that should help you for most sort of general pole movement. And then at the end, you'd wanna add on anything specific to prepare you for the specific movements you're gonna be warming up on that day. So I'll put that in the link if you're interested.

But that's all I have for you today.

If you'd like to come join me for class, see what my warmups are like in the situ I would certainly love to have you. If you wanna work on your flexibility feel good flex class, not contortion training. It's, it's for, you know, the person who sits at the desk all day like me but wants to have a little bit more range of motion for pole tricks.

That's, that's what the vibe is. We push ourselves, but we're not going ham. And yeah. So I hope this was informative. I hope you learned something. I hope you understand now why you should warm up and are convinced that you should, if you have not been currently and also that you should not be doing flexibility training during your warmup.

 And I look forward to perhaps training with you soon. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.