I’m very sure that with adrenalin pumping you would not need as long a warm up.
In fact, it’s obvious. Here’s a question for anyone interested in the above;
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Anytimme you’ve done shaddow boxing, ball throwing, basketball have you ever pulled a muscle?
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Anytime you’ve ever had a fight (especially a “street” fight), have you ever pulled a muscle? injuries that might have happened because of infliction from your opponent do not count.
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have sometimes you been hit by suprise (like you walked in to something) and had been in intensely annoying/shocking pain, more than you thought would have been probable?
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In a fight or another fight or flight situation have you recieved a good knock/hit that didn’t seem to bother you that much at the time but you thought about it later and wondered why it didn’t hurt more?
Motoneurons gamma are the things sitting in your spinal cord that tell the muscle spindles how far they are allowed to stretch at the moment. These are turned on by the cold centre and turned off by the heat centre in your hypothalmus. This is why when your body temperature is low you are less flexible. Hence, you warm up before you exercise so you don’t pull something.
The fight or flight response also affects the motoneurons gamma, bypassing the need to warm up and instantly giving the muscles more range.
The best example I have is when my car alarm pager went off whilst I was in the supermarket, indicating that someone had crashed into my car. I was really stiff from a weight workout the day before, but suddenly all pain went and I took off and sprinted flat out for 200m, far faster than I normally would and with no pain at all. By the time I reached my car I was shaking with anticipation only to find that the car pager was malfunctioning. I felt relieved but somehow cheated of the conflict. Weird.
I felt like this 
(:mad::baddevil::karate::mrt::(
A general reply to the comments about animals not needing to stretch or warmup before commencing exercise:
This is not completely true. Unless the fight-or-flight response is directly involved most animals will stretch and warmup before indulging in intense activity. Lions and other predators stretch for quite some time before going out hunting. On a more domestic scale, dogs taken out for a walk in the woods will spend some time first running around sniffing things, and their first few pursuits of creatures they see will be half-hearted.
And animals do get injured, they do strain muscles, they can get chronic injuries. One of the easiest ways to ruin a horse is to take it cold on a full gallop straight out of the stables. The younger the animal, the less warming up it does, but watch any animal grow older, and you will see that it gets gradually more cautious about the way it rushes into things. Humans are no different.
I am not suggesting an animmal does not need to warm up. The fact is though, they spend less time warming up for fullspeed chases than what some athletes do for their sprints. this is becuase it would be to risky for a lion or cheetah for example to spend to much time warming up. What are they gonna do, 6 x 60m progressions followed by drills etc before they’re ready?
If their warm up was relatively as high paced as our warm ups they would be giving to much of a clue to their potential prey. Plus, they have to be more conservative with any “volume” of work becuase not all of their hunt/sprints are going to result in catching their prey.
Yes, they warm up, but their warm up is neither as long nor as high tempo as a human athletes warm up. Simply because in their particular quest for survival it would not do them good to have a LONG warm up. Besides, when they are getting close to the moment of chase, their adrenalin + focus + probable excitement will take care of the rest. So with animals it is a bit more of BOTH. Our races of course will have the adrenalin factor but not our training sessions. I take your point about animmals stretching, we’ve all seen cats stretch. we’ve seen wild life programs whereby Lions do these allmighty stretches after a long sleep sometimes. Hell, I might start incorperating some of that in to my program! Funnily enough, aren’t some yoga stretches called “cat” stretches?
I think the question is, would it be advantagous to the human sprinter to put a little bit of adrenalin in to some of their training sessions, with perhaps a slightly shorter warm up? The idea here being, they would have a slightly lower volume of work to do and 2(much more theory orientated), would they be imprinting something in to their physiology/neurology/musculo-skeletal/hind brain a little more powerfully
with a good ol’ bit of adrenalin than without?
note: That LAST part is very “theoryish
etc,” and might not have a lot of grounds, it might be going of in an unnecessary direction. I think it is fun though to wonder about various notions/possibilities.
Interesting - but I think that you get this opportunity in meets to raise the adrenaline levels. I think it would be too taxing to try to raise this in training as well. The rest needed after a meet is not always due to the physical energy expended.
Fair point, Carson.
Great point Carson. The CNS always seems to be far more heavily taxed in a meet even if the times aren’t as good as in training, and of course the volumes will be way smaller. Maybe this whole adrenal response is the trigger?
thanks for explaining the fight or flight thing 
dcw23 - I now have access to a copy of Viru´s Biochemical Monitoring of Sports Training (Human Kinetics, 2001) and so have no excuse. He goes into the hormonal responses to training. Another book on my `must read´ list. I almost bought a copy of his Adaptations to Sport Training, but it was over 100 UK pounds. Damn.
This site is great, a good exercise in humility, as I am consistently reminded of how much I have to learn.