A Better Way to Warm-Up: Infared Light

Good news for those who find warm-ups tedious or tiring or just plain dumb. There’s a faster, and much less dramatic, way to get muscles ready to action. It involves something called "deep thermal therapy," and one good way to get it is from a device used to deliver
polarized near-infrared light. The Scientific American reports on a study of 24 young adults, in which one group of participants rode a stationary bike for
10 minutes to warm up their whole body and another group had
their shoulder and back muscles irradiated with the
near-infrared light-therapy device. A third group received
"placebo" irradiation, in which the light pulses were set at a
very low intensity. Sciam reports that the researchers found that both exercise and the light
therapy improved participants’ range of motion in the shoulder,
but the latter worked slightly better. They believe the therapy
may improve blood flow to the deeper layers of muscle that act
on the shoulder joint. Read more about using infared to warm up in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine.