#30: Don't forget about the warm up

Hey Friends,

The warm up is an often overlooked aspect of the workout. Many people do a half hearted warm up, or skip it altogether.

A solid warm up routine doesn’t need to be rocket science, and also doesn’t need to be very long to be effective.

I’m going to walk through a couple reasons why you should be warming up and give a basic warm up routine that I do before pretty much every workout.

Weekly Action Point

🥕 This week, let’s make more of a conscious effort to add vegetables into our diet. For every dinner this week, include a vegetable with your meal. 🥕 

The easiest way for me to do this is with frozen veggies (I love the stir-fry mixed vegetables from costco), but if you feel like putting more effort in, by all means go ahead and prepare fresh veggies.

Benefits of a Warm up

Most people already know that they should be warming up before their workouts.

But ask yourself: Is a warm up something you currently graze by in order to get to the “real workout”? Or are you being intentional about your warm up?

I’m going to talk through a couple of the benefits of a strong warm up routine.

My hope is that you've already heard many of the benefits I list. I’m not going to be saying anything revolutionary, but sometimes we need reminders about things we know/have already heard in the past.

Here are some of the major benefits of a strong warm up routine:

Increased body temperature - warmer muscles contract more efficienctly, helping with strength and power

Enhanced mobility - the warm up is an awesome time to improve motion in joints like your shoulders, hips, and spine which helps with strength and performance in your workout

Improved coordination - warming up helps to “wake up” your nervous system, which helps with balance and coordinating multiple body parts (as you need to do in compound exercises)

Focus and concentration - not talked about as commonly, but there are many mental benefits to a warm up. Your warm up helps shift your mind from work or day-to-day activities into “workout mode” which helps improve performance and can help you enjoy your workout more

Improved Recovery - warming up before a work out actually helps how you will feel after your workout, allowing you to recover quicker and feel better for your next workout

Injury prevention - all of the things above combine to contribute to injury prevention. Improving mobility, coordination, concentration, temperature, and recovery all help to avoid straining or tweaking something which enhances the longevity of your workouts.

How should you warm up?

So, now that you’ve been reminded of why you should warm up, let’s talk about how to actually do it effectively.

It’s extremely common for people to not really know what they should be doing for a warm up or for how long.

For example, people tell me all the time that they will just walk on a treadmill for 3-5 minutes and then jump into their workout.

If you look at the benefits above, walking on the treadmill can certainly increase your body temperature, and can probably help with shifting your focus. But improving mobility and coordination? Not so much.

So while walking is a totally fine thing to include as a part of a warm up, I don’t think it’s sufficient on its own to be a quality warm up.

I like to include mobility work as part of a warm up, usually totaling about 5 minutes before the start of my workout.

Here’s the exact routine that I do before each workout:

• Cat/cow Stretch - 5 cats, and 5 cows for 10 total

• Thread the needle to chest expansion - 10 on each side

• Scapula Push Ups - 10 reps

• Y’s, T’s, and W’s - 7 of each letter

• 90 90 hip switch - 10 total, 5 each way

*Click the links to see a quick video of how to do each exercise

I do each exercise only one time, and then I’m ready to go. Personally, I don’t walk on a treadmill at all before a workout. By the time I’m done with these exercise, I can feel that my body temperature has come up, which is really the main benefit of walking on a treadmill anyways.

If you want to also add in walking, biking or some other form of light movement into your warm up, go for it! It definitely won’t hurt anything, but makes the duration of your warm up longer.

In addition to these exercises, if you are lifting weights I recommend using your first set as a warm up set. Go really light on the weight and move slowly (3 count on the way down) before getting to a heavier weight that you would use for your working sets.

Ben’s Best

The meal prep I’ve been loving lately is a ground beef sweet potato bowl.

- ground beef
- sweet potato
- black beans
- individual mini guacamole cup
- chalula

You can use whatever quantities of these that make sense for you. This in an extremely easy food combo that I think is delicious every time.

I cut the sweet potato into cubes and bake them with salt and pepper, otherwise I don’t even season anything. The guacamole and chalula provide all the flavor I need.

If you want a recipe that takes more time and effort, you could also try out these honey lime chicken bowls that I made. These bowls had amazing flavor, but were definitely more work.

eatinghealthytoday

View more on Instagram

P.s. That instagram account is a great one to follow for food inspiration

Have an awesome week everyone!

Keep reminding yourself that you don’t need to do anything crazy to achieve your goals. Small baby steps taken consistently over a long period of time is how we get there. 🙂 

Ben