By Leo Shveyd, Co-Owner of Advanced Wellness
Fitness pros (professionals for whom health and performance matter) ALWAYS warm-up for their training sessions. Here’s why…
Warm-Up Fundamentals
There are four elements that can be trained in any human with regard to fitness regimens: the spirit, the mind, the body and the craft (or intended skill). Each element of your workout also has a gradual beginning (warm-up) on the way to reaching the peak of your routine, followed by a decline back to a resting state.
Warming up for your workout serves a multitude of purposes for the body:
- Stimulates the respiratory system
- Increases body temperature
- Allows you to access your full range of mobility options
- Improves motor control, especially with regard to anticipated movements (from simple, to progressively more complex and more challenging).
Nasal breathing during the warm-up period is a critical component as it provides your body with maximal levels of oxygenated blood in order to elevate performance. Marrying your inhale and exhale to movements is also incredibly powerful (although explaining this in detail will be covered in a separate blog post). Moreover, focusing on one’s breath also addresses the spiritual component, as nasal breathing provides a calming component to the nervous system. Your warm-up is a conversation with your body! What’s yours saying today?
Why Vary Your Warm Up?
Every year at Advanced Wellness, we design a new and improved warm-up routine to be used over the course of the coming 12-months. For some of our 140+ clients, change is a bit hard; they simply don’t like it. For those individuals, this new warm-up approach provides mental stimulation, helping the brain access new neurons and stay challenged. We also have clients that embrace change. For those individuals, we not only change the warm-up once a year, we also provide “alternative warm-up” weeks. An alternative warm-up week occurs one week out of every month, where our members can practice the new simplified alternate to the regular warm-up.
In designing a new warm-up, we consider the objectives of the warm-up (outlined above) as well as concepts of developmental kinesiology (movement from the ground up and from the center out to the extremities), flow, and address specific limitations of our clients. In addition to the many members we have at Advanced Wellness, we also have several other individuals that come to see us for specific body related issues. As a result, we conduct many Functional Movement Screens (FMS), along with other more extensive assessments. Throughout that process, we are able to collect data, see patterns and better understand what limits our clients have from a training perspective. Understanding their limitations allows us to craft more individualized solutions to help our clients get BETTER. Patterns we see frequently are addressed in the warm-up, multiple times and in different ways; while patterns that are less problematic are addressed less frequently in the form of prehab (a movement that specifically addresses a limitation seen in our population base with an emphasis on preventing it from becoming a bigger problem).
Our 2020 Warm Up Routine at Advanced Wellness: Anything BUT Routine
Here’s this year’s warm up “routine” includes a variety of elements including breathing techniques, a variety of positions and planes of motion, mobility, stability, balance techniques, and more, and is anything BUT “routine”. We hope you enjoy practicing it!
Have questions about our 2020 workout warm up or the rationale behind it or a specific move, get in touch.
Here is to you in 2020 and getting BETTER!