Cool-Downs

The cool-down is an often overlooked, but extremely important aspect to an effective training program.  Workouts, especially at high-intensities, increase waste in the body.  Your lymphatic system works to normalize your body and rid your body of excess waste, but it works primarily through muscle contractions and gravity.  So, if you finish a workout and then sit around and do nothing, your body is less efficient at removing the built up waste from the workout. This can cause increased stiffness and soreness not to mention take away from potential results, After every workout, we cool-down to help flush your system and maximize your results from your efforts.

Additionally, we need to get your body out of the stress mode that workouts put it in and the quicker we can down regulate our central nervous system, the more time we have for recovery. Breathwork is an amazing tool that can flip a switch in our body in a matter of minutes. By exhaling twice as long as our inhales, we can signal our brain to get us into rest and recovery mode.

We are already hot and sweaty and already implementing the style of breathwork that adds to the benefits of your workout which are two major things that boost targeted mobility exercises. So, to support our journey of developing full ranges of motion and feeling great day-to-day, we use mobility tools, like foam rollers, and protocols at the end of class to further enhance our recovery and function of muscles and joints. We do self-massage, stretch, and do stability work to consistently make improvements to your capacity to move your body through a full ranges of motion.

From there, we like to end the cool-down with some high quality movement. We choose our cool-down exercises wisely as we are trying to:

  1. focus on improving and building functional movement patterns that integrate with the area we just worked on and

  2. perform the reverse the exercises in the workout to help balance our posture out after a fatiguing effort.

We think of our cool-downs as part of our workouts. Through starting and ending our workouts with 5+ minutes dedicated to prep, learning technique, recovery, and improving range of motion, we consistently, efficiently, and effectively use our gym time to get the most bang for our buck. A lot of times it doesn’t take extra time, it just take extra planning and execution.

Here’s the MovementLink Cool-down Protocol:

  1. Focused Breathing during steps 2, 3, and 4. Exhale twice as long as inhales.

  2. ~3 Minutes of Slow Cardio (we like the air bike or a walk, but anything easy will do)

  3. ~4 Minutes of Targeted Mobility Work: Smash, Stretch, Floss, Distract tissues and or joints to improve their function. Most of the time, we are not trying to mobilize a highly fatigued area in the cool-down. We address an area that may need some love from a previous day’s workout or focus on improving something we will use tomorrow.

  4. A few reps of exercises selected for developing Stability and Quality Movement Patterns.

Here’s An Example:

Let’s say the workout had burpees and thrusters, so the primary movement patterns were squatting and pressing. The quads and the triceps were the most used muscles.


1)

We start controlling our breath, taking twice as long to exhale as our inhales.

2)

3 Minutes of Slow Cardio on Air Bike

3)

Trap Smash with Lacrosse Ball
2 Minutes on Each Side

4)

3 Rounds for Quality
5 Ring Rows
4 Opposite Foot Taps from Wide-stance Push-up Plank

First we started by shifting our focus to our breath.

Second, we performed 3 minutes of slow cardio. We hopped on an air bike and we just want light, easy movement to help circulate blood flow and for easy muscle contractions.

Third, we used a lacrosse ball to smash the lats. Let’s say the next day’s workout has pull-ups, so instead of focusing on the fatigued muscles from today’s workout (quads and triceps), we put our focus on improving something for tomorrow.

Fourth, we wanted to choose exercises that 1) use the mobilized tissues from the third section, the traps, and 2) reversed the movements from the workouts (squats and presses). So, we chose ring rows and Opposite Foot Taps from Wide-stance Push-up Plank to finish the workout with some good movements.