Ensuring your body is properly warmed up is very essential to your activities.

Very often this involves stretching, but can also include shaking of limbs or a nice walk to get the blood flowing.

So, the idea is that by warming up, the muscles get used a little bit, get stretched a little bit, and the blood gets properly circulating into the muscles to ensure they can handle the activities.

Let’s try something.

When you wake up in the morning, try to reach down and touch your toes. Now, after half a day of doing your regular activities, try to touch your toes again.

Notice how after having some warm up time during the day, your muscles are now much more flexible and ready to bend in various directions?

This is because your muscles have had some sort of a warm up time to let them loosen up from the activities.

Now, think of going from rather mild exercise of your day to day activities, into a fun activity like soccer. Your muscles still aren’t as limber as they should be, so you will want to warm them up even further.

This is why many coaches will make their team run circles around the field before a soccer match, or around the ice rink to properly get the limbs warmed up, get the blood flowing, and the heart pumping!

If you do this, you will be helping your body reduce muscle pulls, and ensuring the muscles repair as quickly as possible after strenuous activities.

NOTE: I would even suggest a proper warm up for any task that you do all day, especially manual labor jobs, but even including office desk jobs where you’re sitting still all day.