Cool-Downs: You Probably Don’t Need To
Unlike warm-ups, the research behind cool-downs is pretty clear. They don’t really do much.
Lactic acid: Decreasing lactic acid is something I hear all the time when coaches tell athletes to cool-down. However, the fact is, immediately after stopping exercise, lactic acid leaves our muscles and returns to our blood. Our blood will naturally decrease the levels of lactic acid whether or not we run any further after a workout or race. It does not get stuck in our muscles causing soreness or any other weird reason coaches come up with. Also, lactic acid has not been shown to lead to muscle soreness so who cares if it’s elevated anyway.
Muscle soreness: There is no link between cool-downs and preventing or reducing muscle soreness. In fact, doing too much on a cool-down has actually shown to increase muscle soreness.
Injury risk: There is nothing to show that cooling-down will decrease injury risk either. Injuries and pain are unbelievably complex. I wish preventing injuries were as simple as jogging after a hard workout, but unfortunately its much more complicated.
Odds are these three account for 99% of the reasons that you cool-down. If your reason is up there, it doesn’t mean that your cool-downs have been useless. It means you need a different reason for why you’re performing them. Again, with running, everything we do should have a purpose or we could be holding ourselves back. Below are three reasons to cool-down.
Training volume: Cooling-down is a great way way to add training volume after a workout or race. If you’re training high volume, the high intensity and lower quantity from these runs may not be enough to hit the numbers you need for the day. You should be taking intensity into account with your training to know if you need this bonus volume.
Mental toughness: My coach in college, would always boast about how we were the last team to leave the course after a race. We would have cool-down miles, and multiple strength and mobility routines to finish before we left. Likely we needed the volume to add to our training, but I think his intentions were to toughen us up as well. Being able to prove to yourself that you can still run, after running what you thought was your hardest, can be a huge confidence boost and a great way to build that mental resilience.
Back-to-back competition days: This doesn’t happen very often in running but occasionally, like state track meets, there will be back to back days of races. The research on this is conflicting with some saying that a cool-down can help next day performance, while other’s say, like the rest of the cool-down research, it does nothing for performance. The only time we see a negative effect on performance is cooling-down between competitions in the same day. If you’re feeling inclined and your training plan will allow for it, you may as well cool-down if you have consecutive days.
With all this said, I still do a walking cool-down after workouts and races, because for whatever reason I feel better. If. you like them and your training allows for extra volume a light, easy jog is more than enough. If you like them and your training doesn’t, a walk won’t hurt. If you’re someone who despises cool-downs, then don’t do them and likely nothing will happen.
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Reference:
Van Hooren, B., Peake, J.M. Do We Need a Cool-Down After Exercise? A Narrative Review of the Psychophysiological Effects and the Effects on Performance, Injuries and the Long-Term Adaptive Response. Sports Med 48, 1575–1595 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-018-0916-2