Warming up helps prepare your body for aerobic activity. As you start to warmup your body revs up your cardiovascular system by raising your body temperature and increases the blood flow to your muscles – making your muscles less likely to rip, tear or twist in your workout. Warming up may also help reduce muscle soreness and lessen your risk of injury.
So never underestimate a good warmup!
Let me paint you a picture… you park your car, get out in a hurry dropping one of your gloves on the floor when reaching for your gym bag. You’re running late to a class and you’re worried about the extras that you may have to do. Now, we have all been there before, myself included… way too many times, and I still do it to this day.
However, getting extras for being late or getting called out by the coach in front of everyone isn’t actually the worst thing about this scenario. It’s more starting the class without warming up, without getting yourself ready, your equipment ready, your body ready and your mind ready.
You then start the class without any real intent on understanding what you’re doing in the session or what you want to get out of it. See, a warm-up is more than just getting yourself sweaty and ‘warm’. Yes, they are both important but there is much more to it than just that.
FIRSTLY – think of a warm up as a recovery and assessment tool. Moving your possibly sore and tight body helps to recover from the session yesterday and acts as a ‘systems check’ to see if everything is working “right” and it actually feels good. This is without even going into detail about the massive aid to injury prevention warm ups have.
SECONDLY– it’s setting a foundation for strong, solid movement in the session ahead.
This might be working on some flexibility/range of movement drills so you have the mobility in the bottom of a squat. This also might be some glute/core work so you stay strong in the whole movement of a deadlift. And it certainly might be a skill or a ‘prep work’ component we frequently do in Funky Fit which is such a great way to get yourself ready for a complicated or a new movement or exercise.
THIRDLY – it helps you mentally prepare yourself for the session. You get focussed and in that, you simply perform at a higher level… you hold that plank 10 seconds longer or you smash out 20 cals faster than you thought you could, all because you were READY to GO and READY for it.
The thing is, WARMUPS will set your workout up for SUCCESS.
So what does this look like?
It might look different from one person to the next and that is absolutely fine. For some, it might be getting there 5-10 minutes EARLY (what Michael would call on time) so you get all your gear ready and you start on the bell with the group class warm-up. It might be coming in and doing a few yoga flows because it always makes your hips, knees and back feel so much better before a class. It might be coming in knowing there are a lot of squats in Funky today and doing some glute activation work before the group warm-up to help with your position and stability in the bottom of a squat.
Whatever it looks like for you, I challenge you to take on your version of warming up this week and letting your coach know how it feels.
Go get your chilli hot!
Coach Eden
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