Warm Up Part 2

Part II - Exercises to include in a warm-up

Now that we have established why it is important to do a warm-up before playing sports or working out (i.e. preventing injuries, improves muscle pliability, improves neuromuscular coordination, etc), what do we include in a warm-up?

Firstly, when planning a well-rounded warm-up routine we have to take into account the muscles we will be using for the task/sport.  For example, if we look at olympic weight lifting, the sport places high demands on the core, shoulders, and hips.  In order to lift heavy weights to do squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, etc., we need to have strong and active stabilizing muscles as well as good coordination to appropriately time the lifts.

Secondly, we want to cover all of the planes of movement in our warm-up routine.  This means that we want exercises that challenge the sagittal plane, frontal plane, and transverse plane.  This will ensure stability and reactivity in all the planes of movement.

A good example of a core warm-up that will cover the 3 planes of movement is the McGill BIG 3:

• McGill curl-up - works on sagittal plane stability
  
  

Side plank - works on frontal plane stability

• Bird Dog - works on transverse plane stability

Next, to fire up the glutes for our “olympic weight lifting” workout, a good example of a glute warm-up would be the following:

• Banded monster walks (sagittal plane)

Banded side steps (frontal plane)

Banded pivots (transverse plane)

The goal of a warm-up is not to tire out the muscles, but to “wake them up.”  Feel free to add 1 set of 10 reps of each of these exercises to your warm-up routine before doing heavy squats and deadlifts.