How to warm up properly?

You could hear a lot of athletes would say: a warm-up is important to stay safe and avoid injuries while you are working out in a gym. Yes, that's true, but have you ever thought how warm-up is affecting the quality of your workout? If you won’t make your body ready for a core workout, you don’t have any chances to use the full potential of your body.

What happens with you when you are beginning your workout with an active warm-up for all parts of the body?

You are not only activating the joints and warming up the muscles, but you are also making a connection between your nervous and muscular systems. It's like a musician tunes up his instrument. So, a pre-workout warm-up is extremely important.

I'll be talking in this article about the general warm-up. The connection “muscles-brain” I'll describe for you in another article. That's a secret weapon of anyone who already knows what that is)

What is stopping you from engaging in a quality pre-workout warm-up and to feel the effect of it? That would be a lack of systematization in an exercise order.

And I'll be happy to tell you some of the basic key points on how to make proper exercise order:

Choose a place to warm up, that has enough free space where you would not hamper your movements. Also, would be very good if you've got a mirror there to make sure you are performing the exercises properly.

It worth to start with the exercises from the body limbs and gradually rising or going down.

The movements for pre-workout warm-up should have a static-dynamic character. It means you need to use a bit of resistance at the end of each movement.

You don't have either to warm up yourself with fanatically flapping your hands like the wings with the hope to take off or make slow pulling movements which make you fall asleep.

Also, when you start to warm up your body and you have muscle fever from the previous workout, the movements of that nature will not cause discomfort while you are performing the exercises.

Use basic developmental exercises at the beginning of warm-up, arm windmills, single-leg lunges, rotations, bends, and flexions-extensions.

Begin your warm-up with the neck and then go down for a sequence convenience. It is necessary to clarify that the rotational movement of the neck - is a purely individual exercise and if you do not have difficulty with this exercise, you should not limit yourself.

In this section, I'll give you a few general options of pre-workout warm-up. I will describe them with more details and more examples next time.

1. If you used to warm up on a treadmill, you should start with walking at an incline (uphill). Use intervals, change your incline and speed settings.
2. Use bodyweight exercises for legs, chest, back, shoulders, and arms. That exercise is going to give you a vivacity. And it uses not much of your energy. You better do it before lifting heavyweights.
3. Individual warm upsets. Perform several exercises in a row without rest. You can use bodyweight exercises and weight machines. These exercises are selected for those parts of the body which you are going to use with low weight and repetitions (about 20 to 30).
4. A good way to stretch up is using resistance bands.

In the end, I'd like to notice - you don't have to do the same pre-workout exercises for your warm-up every time. Warming up should be for you as some ritual before you begin your workout and it is worth to listen to yourself.

There is no general-purpose set of warm-up, but there are important key points.

The most important thing you need to remember - the greater weight you will use for your workout, the more carefully you need to warm up.

You may also want to read about workout journal and its importance in this article.