It’s thoroughly recommended that you run through a comprehensive warm up before you start any physical exercise. This helps to minimise the likelihood of injury occurring and also maximises your potential for that session, if your muscles are warmer they will work optimally.
Here at Short Motivation, we like to go one stage further. In addition to our warm up, we’ll jog quickly to the park or to the gym, with a backpack. Walking or cycling to the gym or fitness event is advisable over taking the car. Everything counts.
We’ve separate the stages in to three components:
| Stages | Benefit | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heart Raiser | Raise your heart level, get the blood moving and muscles warmed up |
| 2 | Dynamic Stretches | Get your muscles engaged before your workout |
| 3 | Positive Reinforcement of Perfect Technique | Perfect your technique, using bodyweight exercises, before hitting the weights |
Jogging on the spot, with high knees, is an excellent way to get the muscles moving, blood flowing and your heart raised
Heart Raiser. To begin the warm up start with a gentle heart raising exercise. Some examples could include fast jogging or cycling, or if space is limited you could run on the spot, with high knee intervals, star jumps or skip, as long as it’s of a high intensity it’s good.
Up to ten minutes (depending on fitness level and exercise intensity) for your heart raiser is the ideal target, enough to get you a little out of breath and maybe breaking a sweat. For the next section we sometimes like to try to mix things up and incorporate into our heart raiser.
Bodyweight lunges. You can perform these whilst doing your heart raiser.
Dynamic Stretches. These are stretches that are performed whilst you are moving. For example you could perform walking lunges, exaggerating the length of the lunge to really get a good stretch. We’d would aim to do three or four for each body part you are going to be working. Some other examples could be bodyweight squats to stretch out all the muscles of your legs, straight arms circles to get your shoulders working, or torso twists to get your core muscles engaged and firing.
It’s thoroughly recommended that you run through a comprehensive warm up before you start any physical exercise
Positive Reinforcement of Perfect Technique. Many people overlook this because they might often be in a rush, take the car to the gym, perform their workout as fast as possible and then leave without a warm down. If you can take a little bit of time to think about exactly how you are performing the movement and make sure your technique is good then you will see a big improvement in your personal bests (PBs) and also should decrease the possibility of injury through poor form.
Positive technique reinforcement should be performed before all your weighted lifts, especially the more complex ones, it can also be used to slowly warm up to the weight you are lifting, rather than jumping straight in to a heavy weight.
For example, if you’re going to exercise with a kettlebell, we suggest you work on some bodyweight technique reinforcement moves such as swinging your arms, performing a “clean” with a lighter weight and so on.
You’re now good to go! We suggest you check out one of our many training articles once warmed up fully.
