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By GINA KOLATA @ NY TIMES
Published: October 13, 2009

MY husband and I were riding our bikes not long ago, and when we were about a mile from home, we did our usual thing. We call it the sprint to the finish: ride as hard and as fast as we can until we reach our driveway, racing to see who could get there first.

We pulled up, slammed on our brakes and hopped off our bikes. A neighbor was walking by and said, “How did you do that?”

“I just put on my brakes,” I told him. No, he said, he meant how could we just stop like that without cooling down?

Strange as it might seem, that had never occurred to me. But the cool-down is enshrined in training lore. It’s in physiology textbooks, personal trainers often insist on it, fitness magazines tell you that you must do it — and some exercise equipment at gyms automatically includes it. You punch in the time you want to work out on the machine and when your time is up, the machine automatically reduces the workload and continues for five minutes so you can cool down.

The problem, says Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas, Austin, is that there is pretty much no science behind the cool-down advice.

The cool-down, Dr. Tanaka said, “is an understudied topic.”

”Everyone thinks it’s an established fact,” he added, “so they don’t study it.”

It’s not even clear what a cool-down is supposed to be. Some say you just have to keep moving for a few minutes — walking to your car after you finish a run rather than stopping abruptly and standing there. Others say you have to spend 5 to 10 minutes doing the same exercise, only slowly. Jog after your run, then transition into a walk. Still others say that a cool-down should include stretching.

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Article is from the NY Times.