Intro disclaimer: there are a multitude of ways to properly warm up depending on experience, sport, etc. The goal of this post is to hopefully broaden your horizon or confirm what you already do or know.

Warming up is about as essential as it comes for exercising. The benefits of a proper warm up drastically outweighs any reason you may have for not doing it. The most common purpose of a warm up is to prevent injury as well as prep your muscles for optimal performance. “Warming up” got its name because it involves motions to raise your body temperature, thereby allowing your muscles to stretch and shorten to full potential.

A major product and goal of warming up is flexibility. The majority of people would agree that stretching is an effective way to increase flexibility and I completely agree, however, flexibility is a broader term and stretching is a piece of the pie.

When you aim for flexibility in warming up, focus on Range Of Motion (ROM) for the joints that will be used for the upcoming training session. An example would be a sprinter with a tight hip flexor. After a proper warm up, the muscle will hopefully be warm enough for him to be able to sprint maximally with a lesser risk of strain, allowing full leg extension on his ground contacts which will boost his stride efficiency.

I prefer a two-part warm up. The first part involves a general warm up period of 5-10min of slow activity that increases heart rate and deep muscle temperature (my kids pass a Frisbee around while skipping). After the general warm up comes the sport-specific warm up for 8-12 minutes of dynamic activities that focus on increasing the ROM. I have my sport specific activities build in intensity as the warm up progresses.

There are a lot of right ways to do a warm up as long as you understand and follow the basics. Don’t be impatient and potentially cause an injury that takes you out of the game for months which could been prevented with a solid 12-15min warm up. Train smart to #TrainBIG.

Schaudt is out!