“I ran like a cheetah - well, like a cheetah that smoked too much.” - Unknown
Hello friends,
I’ve heard the argument many times from the ‘warmups are a waste of time’ camp:
“Why do I need to warm-up? Do you ever see a cheetah stretch before it chases down its lunch?”
Of course, I reply: “No, no I have not seen a cheetah stretch before it mauls an antelope”. Little do they know that I’m just buttering them up.
The grounds for this argument from the anti-warmup team are that if the fastest and likely most athletic animal in the world can reach top speeds nearing 100kmph without having to do a dynamic warmup, why the hell should us humans have to? Well without getting too in-depth into genetics here, we are quite differently built from a cheetah.
- Cheetahs are cats; we are apes.
- Cheetahs have four-legs; we have two.
- Cheetahs average over 80kmph sprint speed; humans (aside from the top 1%) probably reach top speeds in the low 20kmph.
When really comparing the two species, I find myself coming back to this fact: Cheetahs have been evolving their super-power that is speed for many, many generations. The fastest cats can catch the most prey. Those who catch the most prey live longer. Those who live longer can mate more and pass along more genetic code. This cycle has repeated numerous times, and the end product is the fastest living thing on earth.
What are human’s super-powers you may ask? Our BRAINS. While cheetahs and most other animal species have been relentlessly developing physical attributes to dominate their respective kingdoms, great apes/humans have been sneakily sharpening our minds to compensate for the lack of pure athleticism. ‘Work smarter, not harder’, some may say. With sharpened minds, we were able to sharpen spears and other tools to do the work of our ever-slowing muscles. With slower speeds and brighter minds, humans developed farming as a means to an ever-present food source. What this led to, is a species that hasn’t truly needed to hunt and chase its prey for thousands of years. Although this agricultural revolution has been paramount in turning our species into the great conquerors and allowing us to live upwards of 120 years, the downside has been the de-evolution of our species physically – we have gotten fat and lazy.
So while humans have been enhancing our brains to get the upper hand in this game of evolution, cheetahs have been sculpting their incredibly fast-twitch muscle tissue to contract faster, build bigger, and become injury resistant. A pulled hamstring to a cheetah is quite literally life and death; if it can't sprint then it can't hunt, and if it can't hunt it will not survive. So during its millions of years of evolution, you better believe that cheetah’s muscle quality became quite robust and injury resistant.
A pulled hamstring on a human, though might hurt like hell, really doesn’t have such implications. Six to eight weeks off of beer-league sports, and pizza delivery compared to walking to the grocery store doesn’t really hold us back evolutionarily. That, coupled with humans willing trade-off of muscle power for brain power puts us in our current state. We have opted for the desk chair and computer versus the Savannah. We have slowed down, replaced muscle tissue with fat tissue, gone from all-fours, to bipedal upright walkers, to slouch-backed sitters. We have evolved to require a warm-up before sprinting. Cheetahs have not.
Now you look me in the eye and tell me that there is any physical comparison between us and a cheetah – I’ll wait.
Winners warm-up.
Losers find excuses not to.
Don’t be a loser.
- Kev
5th Quarter Recovery Team