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Performance<\/a><\/p>\n Lower intensity, personalisation, and practice will get you to the start line primed for performance.<\/p>\n Kristof Ramon, Cor Vos<\/p>\n How much thought do you give your warm up? Where did your protocol come from? For most riders it\u2019s a borrowed routine, something a coach prescribed, one they read online from a pro team, or just something they\u2019ve always done.\u00a0<\/p>\n But what if your warm up is actually costing you performance instead of priming you for it? In last week\u2019s episode of Performance Process, I sat down with performance engineer Chris Blomfield-Brown to unpack why we should stop calling it a \u201cwarm up,\u201d start thinking about it as \u201cactivation,\u201d and practical measures to get the most from your pre-race ride.\u00a0<\/p>\n Blomfield-Brown has spent 12 years investigating warm up routines. He worked as a race engineer in motorsport, then worked at Core helping develop the core body sensor, and now heads up Ultra Cool Tech<\/a> which develops various products aimed at maintain thermoregulation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Together we discussed why so many warm ups are actually counterproductive (briefly: they’re too intense), the issues with overheating, why tailoring the protocol to the individual is critical, how important it is to time the end of the routine with the start of the event, and why practising a warm up in training matters as much as the intervals themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n The correct warm up isn\u2019t just a marginal gain; mitigating the significant losses caused by getting a warm up wrong are just as powerful. In fact, one rider I worked with recently averaged 35 watts more power over the same distance simply by switching from his old, overly intense routine to a personalised activation protocol. Here\u2019s what we did. <\/p>\n While likely not the case for everyone, most riders\u2019 warm ups aren\u2019t derived from science or testing on themselves, but are rather just a protocol that has worked for someone else.\u00a0<\/p>\n The trouble, Blomfield-Brown explains, is warm ups are usually too intense, with too much anaerobic work and all too likely to see the rider overheating, which can be hugely detrimental to performance. All told, by the time the rider rolls up to the line, lactate is already accumulating and their core temperature is already elevated. In effect, they\u2019ve eliminated their initial buffer before the race has even started.<\/p>\n \u201cIn some cases, a rider would have been better off skipping the warm up entirely,\u201d Blomfield-Brown quipped. The line was lightly delivered, but he has seen enough of these warm-ups in practice that this is no joke, rather a surprising reality about how many of us warm up.\u00a0<\/p>\n Using muscle oxygen sensors (smO2), Blomfield-Brown and his team observed hundreds of warm ups across athletes of all ages, levels and genders, from juniors to world champions. They identified four consistent issues:<\/p>\n This post is for paying subscribers only Already have an account? Sign in<\/a><\/p>\n Did we do a good job with this story?<\/p>\n \n \ud83d\udc4dYep![\"Ronan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Ronan-Mc-Laughlin-150x150.jpg\")
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The problem with traditional warm ups<\/p>\n
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