Too often forgotten or dismissed, warm up must be an essential part of your training!
In order to increase your body temperature and lubricate your joints, 10 to 15 minutes are enough to get your body ready to go.
Take it as if it was the really first exercise of your program.
Here is my top 5 exercices you can do to warm up.
1. General joint activation.
What is better than involving every single joint of your body before starting?
That is a good way to slowly get into your training. Take a deep breath, relax your shoulders and go through each body part.
Solicitating all your joints is a good way to check everything is fine and working well.
Exploring all the directions possible will help you prevent any potential injury.
2. Rotator cuffs exercices.
Looking after your rotator cuffs muscles will help you keep your shoulders safe.
Strengthening the rotator cuffs will stabilise your shoulders and develop their capacities and strength.
Pay attention to perform internal and external rotations.
Here are few exercices you can perform, 15-20 reps of each one should be good.
3. Recreate your training.
As you will perform series of exercices during your workout, it sounds fair to your body and muscles to get them ready for it by doing the same movements during your warm up with a really light weight.
If you are doing chest press today, lie on the floor with some light weight and chest press. Same process for squats or any other exercice.
15-20 reps for each exercice, 1 set only.
4. Increase your heart rate.
Even if there is no cardio planned today it is still good to perform some before your session.
Jump on the treadmill, the bike or the rower machine for 3 to 5 min, at slow to moderate intensity.
This will help your blood flowing and circulating to the working muscles. It will also increase your body temperature and keep lubricating your joints.
5. Slightly increase your weights.
The warm up is now almost done, you are about to start your first exercise.
You know what load you will use and how many reps you will perform today.
To help you being really ready, increase slowly your weight untill you reach the one targeted.
For instance, you want to do 10 reps at 40kg. You can start by 20kg and do 3 reps, go up to 30kg for 3 reps, and 35kg for 3 reps again.
The goal is not to perform an extra set and be tired, you just want to feel the load increasing slowly to make sure your muscles are ready for it.
Follow these 5 steps and you will definitely be ready to perform your best training!
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