2 minute read
Why Warm Up
WHY WARM UP?
When if comes to issues like safety, mobility, injury prevention & long term well-being, the warm up is far more important than the workout itself. Before you start any form of exercise or fitness, I really want you to understand some science & value of warming up.
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Performing a comprehensive warm up before your workout serves a number of purposes -
1. To increase the core temperature of your body - this will prepare your body for challenging movements while minimizing the risk of injury. Your core temperature is at its lowest when you wake up, and taking a few extra minutes to warm up thoroughly before you perform a morning workout will pay off in spades.
2. Preparing your joints, limbs, tendons and ligaments for heavy, challenging movements. How often have you heard of someone tearing their muscle in half? It happens, but it isn't half as common as sprains or pulls. Most gym injuries damage your ligaments, tendons and joints more than your muscles. This is why performing 1-2 light sets of bench press before going heavy might warm up your chest and other muscles, but it is not enough to prepare your elbow joints, rotator cuffs, and wrist and shoulder joints. To warm up these areas you have to take a few minutes to do some very light basic movements, which I will demonstrate in the next chapter.
3. Muscle activation - Anyone can pick up a barbell and lift it. But it takes awareness, and a developed mind-muscle connection to activate and stimulate your muscles while lifting the weight and get some results out of doing so. It's easy to use momentum, swing weight up and down and just go through the movements, but if you can't perform them with strict form, and activate and contract your muscles while doing so, you might as well quit, because you're not getting any results from lifting that way.
You can do 5-10 reps of rowing, but if you didn't feel your back muscles contract and execute the exercise properly, what did you gain from putting in that effort? A proper warm up includes 1-3 sets of each body part to allow your mind to feel the correct muscles contract and perform the work while lifting the weight. Starting your workout on this note will set the tone for how effective your performance is during the rest of the routine.
