How You Should Really Start Your Daily Workout…

Warming Up Is One of The Most Underrated Aspects Of Your Workout

From the gym beginner to the weekend warrior to the Olympic athlete, one the key essential aspects within your daily regime is getting in a proper warm up before hitting it hard.

The main points of a warm-up are to do the following 3 items.

1. Raise your body heat/get the blood flowing

2. Prevent yourself from injury

3. Enhance your performance

There is a more technical way to describe it, but let’s just go the plain and simple route for now.

Now the next item, you may ask yourself is what hell consists of a “proper” warm up. The answer is that there are a variety of ways to do it. Through my research and reading, I have seen that some people prefer to hit it with light cardio and foam rolling, while others prefer dynamic stretching only. Essentially, if you mix of those 3 and you can’t go wrong.

That said, I have been experimenting with it recently and came up with a solid mix that has been working for me.

This pre-workout/warm-up mix includes the following 3 ingredients:

1. Light Cardio

2. Dynamic Stretching

3. Foam Rolling (Soft Tissue — Self myofascial release (SMR))

When it comes to light cardio, I usually start it off before I even walk into the gym. Meaning that from my NYC apartment, I lightly jog over to either of my Blink Fitness locations (Chelsea or Midtown East). These light warm up runs usually go for about 1 mile in length. I know when most people hear that they are like that isn’t a warm up at all. Again, there isn’t a one size fit all routine that you must follow.

Once I get to the gym, I follow up the light run with some light foam rolling/soft tissue work. Here, I specifically focus on mobilizing the muscles that I plan to be working out today (i.e. quads and calves on leg day, etc.).

Transitioning from that, I look at focus in on dynamically activating those same exact muscles through a variety of dynamic movements. Sticking with the leg day example, I may pull out the jump rope for some light skipping leading to high knees, butt kicks, couple knee to chest, and leg swings. Again, these stretches are to get the blood flowing and get your muscle working for what is about to come.

Aside from my routine (which I will go into fuller detail in another post), the one cautionary item that I will share with you all is to never do static stretching as your warm up/pre-workout. These type of stretches (i.e. hamstring stretches, groin stretches, etc.) that you hold in place for multiply seconds elongate the muscle and in a cold state, this can lead to potential injury.

If you are going to take away anything from this short write up, understand that there isn’t an exact science to a great warm up, but as long as it readies your muscles and nervous system for a hard workout then you should be well on your way to more muscle gains and less injuries.