@howardrf And someone should tell 1:03 half marathoner and highly regarded coach and exercise physiologist Pete Pfitzinger that his recommended 10-20 minute warmup jog + 10 minutes of dynamic movements (15 if it's a race) + strides is obviously not what he should be having his athletes do. Guess we should also extend that notion to high school, college, and post-collegiate coaches worldwide, because they've clearly been doing it all wrong.
And of all those studies, the one that required the
most warmup (Tabata) is the one that corresponded with the most aerobic base conditioning pre-study (6 weeks). Personally 10 minutes is still skimpy as hell, but it helps that the test was done on a bike, which does not recruit as many muscles as running, and the bike itself somewhat stabilizes the user, reducing the potential for major form issues (though of course someone can still have terrible bike form). The other studies involve totally sedentary or otherwise unhealthy individuals, who might indeed be able to get their heartrate up to a certain level with very minimal warmup, but more than anything that just speaks to how cardiovascularly unfit they are to begin with. If you take a young, healthy, active individual (ie, someone on this sub), they're going to need more warmup to get to where they need to be.
Again, even just using my own (non-elite) anecdotal experience... my RHR is in the low 40s. There's
no way in hell that I could possibly get it even up to my 10 mile race pace (lactate threshold pace, ~6:10ish min/mile pace) with just a few minutes of warmup. Let alone the fact that my legs would be totally lethargic and my turnover would be horrible.
And unrelated/unimportant, but regarding this tidbit:
I unfortunately don't have the time to warm up for 25+ minutes, so I jog for 3 minutes and then the fun begins.
I know people who have qualified for the Olympic Trials while working full time, in graduate school, etc. Really tough to imagine that you only have the time to fit in a 3 minute warmup.
Honestly, I don't want to sound rude, but... what are your credentials? Do you have a background as a coach? Do you study this in school? Or are you just someone had been running idk, a 4 hour marathon on 40 miles/week with no hard efforts, to a 3:50 marathon on 40 miles/week with 10 minutes of hard effort per week? Because in that case, no shit there was an improvement, but the improvement was
way less than it could have been with 70 miles/week, 10-15 of which were "hard", and all the rest easy. That's not to say the fastest person is always the most knowledgeable one, but you can be pretty sure that I'm going to listen to a 2:40 marathoner over a 4 hour marathoner (or whoever, for whatever distance... personally I race the mile/5k, for the most part, but I will have a marathon next year, at least).
