By Leo Shveyd, Co-Owner of Advanced Wellness
Fitness pros (professionals for whom health and performance matter) warm-up for your training workout!
There are four elements that can be trained into any human: The spirit, the mind, the body and craft (or intended skill). Each element has a gradual beginning (warm-up) on the way to reaching the peak of your work-out, followed by a decline back to a resting state.
The warm-up serves a multitude of purposes for the body:
- to increase body temperature
- to access full ranges of available mobility
- to improve motor control, especially in regards to anticipated movements (ranging from low, to progressively more complex and more challenging).
Nasal breathing during the warm-up period is a critical component of providing the body with maximal levels of oxygenated blood in order to elevate performance. Marrying your inhale and exhale to movements is also incredibly powerful (although requires 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. The warm-up is a conversation with your body!
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 160+ 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, with a new simplified alternative to the regular warm-up.
In designing a new warm-up, we consider the purposes 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. Understanding the limitations allows us to craft solutions to help our clients be 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 movement limitation seen in our population base with an emphasis on preventing it from becoming a bigger problem).
Have questions about the rationale or a specific move, let us know. Here is to you and BETTER!