Do I need to warm up?

Or should you just get on your bike and ride?

hen time is short, you want to spend as much of it as possible enjoying a ride or building your fitness. That can make it tempting to sacrifice the boring bits of your time in the saddle that don’t appear to have any tangible benefit – the warmup, for example. But is this an area in which you should be scrimping?

‘It’s an area of contention,’ says sports scientist Greg Whyte, who has worked as director of research at the British Olympic Association. ‘But there’s no doubt that warming up is crucial for certain sessions and is built in naturally to less crucial sessions. If you’re doing a high-intensity interval session it’s critical to prepare your body – and mind – for the session ahead. If you’re doing a long ride it’s slightly less important, but you tend to build it into the ride anyway. You don’t set off at the pace you’re looking to maintain for the duration of the ride, so you may not even be aware that you’re warming up. It’s lineally related to the intensity of the session.’

We could just stop there, but we at Cyclist like a good debate and British Cycling coach Will Newton disagrees with Whyte’s second point. ‘In reality, most people who plan a steady ride don’t start off steady – they start too hard,’ he says. ‘Especially if you set off into a headwind or up a hill, those nice and easy first 20 minutes aren’t nice and easy. I also think it’s age and experiencerelated. If you’re in your early twenties you probably don’t need to warm up. As you get older it becomes more important, especially for your joints.’

A hard session requires more than a bit of light pedalling, so personal trainer and cycling coach Paul Butler has some rules: ‘The harder the ride, the longer the warm-up. A session that involves