How to Warm-up?

What will you learn?

1. You don't need to live with your tight muscles and achy joints.

2. What is holding you back from performing at your max potential.

3. You don't need to spend all your gym time warming up.

4. Static stretching and occasional visit to your chiropractor just won't cut it.

5. How to plan your warm-up.

We all must have come across pain and tightness in a certain area in the body, be it a muscle or a joint that holds us back from performing in a way we should to get the most out of our workouts or the sport that we play. Unfortunately, some age old mediocre static stretches before training don't really work in reducing the pain and tightness and could also further enhance the rigidity of that area making it injury prone. On top of that the warm-up advice that we receive from out planet fitness trainers in eradicating pain really calls for taking matters in your own hands because ultimately our own performance suffers and we think there is a genuine issue with our bodies. Eventually we get ready to pay huge $ to a chiropractor or massage specialist and that too is temporary.

So what should we do?

I am not saying start reading human anatomy books and immerse yourselves in terminologies, no one's got the time and interest in that. however, it is of dire importance to at least know what the root cause of the pain is. I am sure it will not be too difficult for our community who train their bodies to achieve great shit.

In today's day and age there are a lot of great sources online which can help identify the root causes of your pain and what you can really do about it. Generally, almost all of us suffer tightness in either of the neck, lower back, knees and ankle areas. It is indeed not necessary that the pain area is the problem area. Its roots could be somewhere else. Therefore investing a few minutes learning about this will save you from pain, time and money.

There's also no need to undergo a half an hour of warm-up before touching the weights, your warm-up should be short and sweet and should always do the job for you i.e. training hard and performing better.

How to structure your warm-up ?

Think of your warm-up like a step-wise workout :

a) Learn to breathe deep in a circumferential manner or 360 degrees into your torso. Breathing is the foundation over which other training modalities stand(follow this post to get a fair idea about 360 deg breathing - https://www.instagram.com/p/CCwSANAj6dI/a). Assess yourself with 4-5 deep corrective breaths.

Notice I am taking in a deep breath filling my entire torso. To check whether I am doing it correctly, I am using my hands as a cue to fill out my belly with 2/3rds of the air and chest with 1/3rds of it.

b) You have to loosen whatever is tight with the help of foam roller, lacrosse ball /tennis ball or a medicine ball. Roll the tight areas starting off real slow for 15-20 seconds and breathe deep into the painful tender areas.

Foam rolling the lats. Notice that i am rolling slowly and over the pain. At the most tender/painful area, I stop and take couple of deep belly breaths.

Releasing the deep glute/hip muscles that tend to get very tight because of sitting all day.

I am using a medium hard tennis ball, start out with this and graduate to a lacrosse ball or harder variant as you get more mobile.

c) Once the tightness is released, you can now move into opening up the tight areas and activating the muscles that are weak or unused/inactive. For example in most of us the front part of the shoulders and side of the chest are very tight due to constantly working on the computer and parallel the opposite muscles of the upper back are weak. Address this by stretching the chest and front shoulders and performing exercises to awaken the sleeping upper back musculature(eg. band pull apart or prone blackburns or YTWs).

d) Now, since you are quite loose and open, prepare the center of the body for the load it's going to handle in the workout session. Raise your core temperature. Try out either of the anti-extension, anti-lateral flexion, anti-rotation, anti-flexion core variations just for activation purposes and not fatigue. Maybe 2 sets of 10-15 seconds of RKC plank will do the job.

The difference between a standard plank and RKC lank is that in RKC plank once you're in plank pose, you tend to imagine bringing your elbows to your tows and toes to the elbows. this creates immense tightness and raises core temperature. Do this for 5-8 seconds, get back to original plank and tense again.

e) Now you've hopefully broken up a sweat and ready to move. Start with fundamental movements like push ups, squat, lunge, hinging movements. Create a flow : movements done one after the other just to get a feel of what's to come.

f) Finally, since it is time to touch the bar and start with rep number 1, fire the nervous system so that you can recruit as many muscle fibres as you can train at your maximum intensity and potential. Sometimes, even the minimal static stretching may cause a relaxing response in the body, hence it is absolutely essential to wake the nervous system up tp feel charged and ready to hit. Any type of jump, throw, dynamic/speed lifting - eg. hurdle jumps, explosive push ups, med ball throws, speed squats/press done for as minimal as 3 sets of 4-5 does the job.

This entire warm-up session looks like a lot on paper. But when done one after the other, gets the job done is around 10-12 minutes at the max. I think 10 min is something anyone would trade for a healthy, injury free, high performing body.

Try this warm-up template and let me know how it felt.

For more information and assistance on any of the pointers above please reach out by commenting below or email to liftnwander@gmail.com

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