Warming Up
You, in your busy 21st-century modern life, have a finite amount of time to spend on training. So you’d better use your time wisely.
Let’s look at how to structure your training to get the most out of it, to make it so efficient that Japanese Toyota employees would look at it and say “あなたは本当に行って翻訳をチェックしましたか”. Translation? “God damn that’s efficient’. In the next few articles, we’re going to break up training into four chunks: warm up, existing skill refinement, new skill acquisition, and conditioning. Here we go.
The Warm-up
Sadly, warming up is a commonly overlooked component of most people’s training sessions.
Performing a smart, efficient warm-up will help ensure that both your body and mind are prepared for what's in store and help you get the most out of a session.
I like to structure my warm-ups like this:
- Increase body temperature
- Access range of motion
- Activate / prime muscles & movements
- Prehab
Nothing crazy, nothing complex, should take ~15 minutes.
Body Temperature
A warm muscle is a happy muscle. The very firs thing you should do is something that’s going to get your heart rate and body temperature up. My go-to-guy for this is jump-rope. Just a quick 5-minute skip will get your blood pumping and your body warm. If you’re one of the lucky people who live somewhere warm and sunny, you can skip this. I personally don’t find it 100% necessary to get my heart rate going as long as the ambient temperature is hot enough. Your mileage may vary. If in doubt, skip-it-out.
Range of Motion (ROM)
I want to make sure that during training I can get into all the positions I’m going to need. So I want to make sure I have access to the necessary range of motion. You have two types of range of motion:
Resting ROM: the positions you can achieve as soon as you wake up
Active ROM:the positions that need a little coaxing or encouragement to achieve.
I’m personally not a fan of static stretching to warm up, that whole conversation is a bag of beans we're not going to open today.
My preferred choice are exercises that require me to actively move through ranges of motion and be a willing and voluntary participant in my range of motion rather than just a slave to how much gravity can weigh me down into a stretch.
So what to actually do? My favorite way at the moment to accomplish this is the FRC (Functional Range Conditioning) CARS (Controlled Articular Rotations) warm up. It's a simple top-down sequence that has you take every joint through its full range of motion in an active and controlled way.
You might need to do a little more for your body, depending on how good your ‘resting’ range of motion is. The great thing about the CARS sequence is that you’ve at least taken and controlled all your joints through their full range of motion.
For me, and I know for a lot of guys, my hips are stiff as hell. So, once I’ve done my CARS sequence, I’ll spend a little extra time working on opening my hips up. It’s up to you to identify which of your areas need more time and which don’t require as much cajoling.
Activate / Prime Muscles
Next is to get your key movers ready for action. This will be different for everyone depending on your body and your role: base or flyer.
The aim is to identify specific muscles and sport specific movement patterns that play a key role in what we’re about to do and make sure they’re ‘firing’ well and in the case of our movement patterns, that we’re performing them correctly.
Everyone needs different exercises, what works for me might not work for you. Have a think about what you’re doing in your training session, then figure out what muscles or movements you’re likely to use, then pick an exercise or find a way to replicate that demand in a less intense or demanding way. If you’re lost, you can always google ‘glute exercises’ or ‘*whichever muscle* stability exercises’ and you will have a treasure-trove of exercises to pick from.
As a base, lets say I think my specific muscles of importance are my glutes, shoulders and my ‘core'. And I think my sport-specific movements could be air squats, push-ups and a more explosive jumping movement.
As a flyer, your specific muscles you’re interested in priming could be your hands & wrists, shoulders and ‘core’.Your sport specifics movements could be some handstand work, a tumbling / acrobatic element you’re likely to be training later and an exercise for encouraging body tension.
For me, this section of my warm-up would consist of a couple sets of some glute exercisesand some plank position & hollow work. Followed by a set of air squats with a focus on my glute activation / hip extension at the top, a set of push-ups with a focus on correct shoulder positioning and engagement,and then a set of box jumps or vertical jumps to really get everything firing and get my body ready to be explosive later on.
You and your flyer could even work on activating your cores together!!
You want to do just enough to get a little, teensy bit of a burn going. You’re not trying to fatigue yourself, but you’re definitely trying to give your body a taste of what’s to come.
A good rule of thumb is that once you’ve started training, your body shouldn’t see anything new. Find a way to ‘touch’ all the positions and movements needed for your training in the warm-up.
Prehab / Rehab
The last little chunk of my warmup is devoted to either prehab or rehab. Rehab if I’m nursing an injury, or prehab if I want to safeguard against something specific, like keeping my shoulders healthy. Prehab / Rehab is boring. It’s not flashy or fun, but it’s necessary.
By including it in your warmup you ensure that you always have time to get it done and, I feel, it gives it a clearer purpose in my mind. I can think:
‘Ok, I’m doing this now because this is going to affect me in the next hour. And then I can do really cool shit.’
I’m not a physical therapist so I can’t say what exercises you should do specifically to safeguard yourself from injury. But, I can say that in hand to hand we tend to see injuries in the same places: lower back, wrists, and shoulders. So I tend to focus my efforts on those areas.
My advice would be to consult with a qualified professional and have them look at what you’re doing and give you a series of exercises to prevent future injuries and to treat and maintain existing injuries.
Then, you’re good to go!
Performing a proper warm-up is so simple, and doesn't take much time, but it will make a big difference to the quality of your training sessions. Not only does it get your body to a state where it's physically ready for action, it also helps get your mind ready too. By performing the same, or similar, warm up every time, you’re ‘Pavlov-ing’ yourself into a tuned-in mental state that’s focused on training & success.
Next week we’ll take a look at ‘Existing Skill Refinement & New Skill Acquisition’ strategies and techniques to help you get better at things you can already do, and learn to do things you can’t…yet!