You’re on a tight timeline every day. You have a hard time squeezing in workouts, let alone getting enough time to do a round of warm up exercises.
There’s one day where you get to the gym late, skip your warm up exercises, and you wind up pulling a muscle during your workout.
That’s no fun.
Instead of getting your workout in, you’re sidelined for a couple of weeks while your muscle heals. While we often skip the warm up part of our workout, we are increasing our chances for injury.
The good news is that a solid warm up doesn’t have to take too long. Read on to find out more about the finer points of warming up and take a look at a few warm up exercises you can do before your next workout.
Why Warming Up is Important
We often think that it’s OK to skip the warm up because we’re tight on time. The fact is, skipping the warm up can increase the chance of injury. It might be a nagging muscle ache or strain that bugs you for the next couple of weeks.
The fact is, it could easily be avoided if only you only warmed up properly. We have plenty of excuses for not warming up – there’s not enough time, or we simply don’t know what to do.
A good warm up routine gets your body ready to work out. What happens is that you start to increase your body temperature and you get blood flow to your muscles before working out. Your joints and tendons become warmed up and ready to move. You’re ready to take on the stress of a TRX workout or weight lifting workout that has sudden movements.
The Best Warm Up Exercises
There’s a lot of old information out there about warming up. When I was a kid, the right way to stretch before soccer practice was through static stretching. You’ll still see a lot of people do this at the gym. They’re pulling their leg up to stretch their squads, or they’ll pull their arms across to stretch their shoulders out.
You’ll see people do this because sometimes, they don’t know what to do to warm up. You can’t always trust that everyone around you knows what they’re doing.
Static stretching has been found to increase the length of your muscles, but if you use static stretching before a workout, your muscles may lose power. It’s not that other people are wrong for static stretching. It’s just that through exercise science, we found a better, more effective way to warm up. That’s called dynamic stretching.
Dynamic stretching is warming up your body through movement. It’s effective at increasing mobility and preparing your body for your workout.
Does all of this mean that you should completely ditch static stretching? No, absolutely not. Static stretching after your workout can help you maintain and increase the length of your muscles.
A Few Quick Warm Up Exercises Before Your Workout
These are some great warm up routines that you can bring to your workout routines. I gotta give a shout out to Joey Dussel of Transformation Possible. Joey and I worked together at VillaSport in Portland, OR. I got to know him and I quickly found that he’s on top of it. Knowledgeable, professional, smart. Check him out, for sure.
He has a set of warm up routines that are great to do every day and take anywhere from 3-15 minutes. These are also great routines to make a part of a daily stretching routine to increase your overall mobility.
World’s Greatest Stretch Routine
Feel Great Every Day Routine
Core Activation
Full Body Warm Up Routine #1
Full Body Warm Up Routine #2
A Quick Warm Up Routine for the Best Performance
An effective warm up routine can help your body get ready to perform a demanding workout. The better your body is prepared, the better you’ll perform.
That will turn into massive results in the long run. These warm up exercises can be a part of your warm up routine or you can use as a daily stretching routine.
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