Cooling down is beneficial.
Cooling Down Exercises
After a hard workout, doing roughly about ten to 20 minutes of cooling down exercises, usually low in intensity will help the body to calm down and get back into a relaxed state. These include stretching motions and slow walking.
Even though medical studies have shown that cooling down exercises have no proven medical benefit, Mok still recommends them because they will help you feel better after the workout.
Compression Wear
While some runners wear compression clothing during their runs, Mok actually recommends that you wear it to aid in recovery after the run instead.
This is because after running, such clothing compresses your veins and increases your body’s blood pumping efficiency, thus helping to speed up recovery.
During runs, it does not help because according to Mok, such compression wear reduces heat loss from your body, thus making runners feel hotter and even more uncomfortable.
Besides running though, compression wear is also useful during long-haul flights to prevent deep vein thrombosis.
Massages are useful to recover after a workout.
Sports Massages
While sports massages do help you to feel relaxed and release your muscles to make them softer, Mok recommends that this is not necessary. But if you have the finances and time, do go ahead and get yourself a massage.
If you are going for a massage, do it about three to four days before your race, and again two days after it to aid in muscle recovery. On race day itself, such massages do not really help much and are used more to advertise the companies doing them.
Cryotherapy (Ice bath)
Cryotherapy is where you soak yourself in a bath full of ice for several minutes, straight after your race. Usually, several kilos of ice are used.
The concept behind it is that it is supposed to reduce the inflammation of the muscles and flush any toxins in the body back to the liver.
However, this recovery method is not practical, according to Mok because of the efforts required to get hold of, and set up the ice bath. Also, you will have to fork out money to buy several kilos of ice on a weekly basis for your training runs. So if you are interested to use this method to help you recover, try to limit it to only after a race, and not a hard training session.
To help participants out with training for the Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore in early December, the organising team is conducting a series of training talks to give tips and insightful feedback to runners.
While the talks are open to runners taking part in all categories (10km, 21km and 42km races), the tips are geared more to those participating in the 42km category.
If you have registered for the Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore, you can find out more about the other training talks here. Each one costs $10.
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