Drawing the Heat: How to nail your warm-up

February 17, 2017 O M

"Don't skip the warm-up."

If not the most common training advice dispensed, certainly the most ignored. A casualty of the 'it won't happen to me', mentality, nothing makes us switch off quicker than a safety message, particularly one we've heard a thousand times.

As seen throughout Leftfield 101, we frequently have good reason to be sceptical of the fitness information we hear, but in this case, it would pay to listen. Skipping the warm-up is, at the very least, ignoring some strong cues from your body that it needs to prepare. We are under no illusions that sitting on our arses all day, only to get home, walk into the kitchen and pick up the fridge, is probably not the best idea, but the equivalent happens every day in any gym.

Even the pious among us who do warm-up, often do little more than a cursory set of toe-touches or the static stretching drilled into us as children - a lingering hangover that we haven't yet managed to shake. All guilty of it for few reasons other than the fact that humans are dumb-arses.

So what's the point then?

The warm-up primes us to train effectively, preparing us physiologically and psychologically for what follows:

Your core temperature increases (duh)
Improves alignment and posture
Release connective tissue and distributes and heats synovial fluid in the joint space helping to make the body more flexible.
Increases muscle core temperature increasing the force of muscle contractions and making movement feel easier.
Releases catecholamines - neurotransmitters that prepare the body for physical activity.
Prepares the body hormonally, helping to create an environment favourable for burning fat as well as giving an adrenaline boost that will further benefit the subsequent training session.
Increases nervous system conductivity making our movement more efficient and reducing injury potential.
Increases the metabolic rate delivering oxygen to working muscles more quickly.
Causes blood vessels to dilate, allowing nutrients to enter the working muscles, which helps you lift more, run faster and jump higher.
Allows increased maximum cardiac output and oxygen consumption, increasing endurance and speed.
Focuses the mind increasing motivation and intensity.

From this point, we are now ready to draw the maximum benefit from our first sets of exercise - always the most important.
You could run a couple of laps, get warm and even build up a sweat, but this then leaves you ready for one thing only - more running. Every Leftfield Training session incorporates whole-body movements through a full range of motion, so this is what we prepare for.

Through corrective exercise, we focus individually on our respective movement restrictions, then, in a movement preparation phase, we prime body and mind based on the needs of both neuromuscular and cardiovascular systems, and in a manner suited to the training session to follow. The warm-up moves from the ground-up, steadily increasing in intensity, with each stage leading to the next:

THE LEFTFIELD 6-STAGE WARM-UP

Breathing drills, 2 minutes: Resetting alignment and (re)training efficient breathing patterns as well as aiding the switch into a training mindset and a focus on the body.
Foam rolling, 2 minutes: Addressing personal trouble-spots and/or areas specific to the movements to follow.
FMS 2-4 minutes - personal corrective exercises addressing individual movement restrictions.
Movement preparation, 5 minutes - here we move into a series of exercises ranging from muscle activation through to mobility and stability drills.
Locomotion drills, 4 minutes - everyone is up on their feet and working through various movements in different planes of motion working up to a final sprint.
Power exercises - upper or lower body - 1-3 sets paired with FMS drills.

[If you want to follow this framework for your own warm-ups, you can download an infographic including examples, HERE]

Adding the power component to every Leftfield warm-up reflects it's importance to our overall wellbeing. The maintenance, or more likely, rehabilitation, of our ability to jump, throw and otherwise move powerfully, is overlooked through a lack of understanding of their relevance in our everyday lives. When our glory days on court and pitch are behind us, if anything, it becomes even more important we retain our ability to move powerfully - with speed and force.

If you have to rapidly adjust yourself to avoid or protect yourself in a fall it's precisely this property - energy divided by time - you'll be calling on. A skill many in an emergency find wanting, only because they deliberately stopped training it. Less appreciated, is that these abilities are granted to us courtesy of a neural framework. For every physical expression we allow to lapse, each of it's associated neural elements will dull or disappear, correspondingly. If you stopped jumping when you left school, then, along with your ability to get off the ground, a host of other abilities went along with it e.g. your brain has little need to keep the full suite of spatial awareness operating. And that's just a start.

This warm-up sequence takes 20-25 minutes after which both body and mind are lit-up and ready for action. Now many of you will see this as overkill -why waste this much time when you could be getting on with the real work? And there is a good reason for this.

The reason being, sadly, that most personal trainers are shithouse.

The Blowtorch

A reliable pointer as to how we might best go about most things in life, is looking to those who already do it best, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants, modelling success, and all that. And, without exception, you'll see all of the best gyms, trainers, sporting teams, and military units including all of the practices above in one form or another.

It's at this point that idiot trainer will present their watertight rebuttal - but my clients are not athletes.

- Uh huh. They are HUMAN, though, right?

These practices are determined not by our athletic ability, or otherwise, but by our species. We are all starting with the same hardware - skeletal, muscular and nervous systems. Which means that warm-up procedures should be virtually identical across all these fields. And, sure enough, they are. Because it's BEST PRACTICE.

This warm-up pasted on the wall of any one of these elite gyms would be invisible - camouflaged by its ordinariness, but if you kicked off a body-pump class with a breathing exercise those attending would think it was witchcraft. The elite have the same, if not more, demands on their time as the rest of us, and given every minute spent 'fitness' training takes athletes away from their sports-specific skill development, it's fair to assume that nothing is added for shits and giggles. And yet, this format remains either unknown or ignored by mainstream fitness. Both equally damning.

Despite the requisite well-documented evidence supporting each practice. Despite their universal adoption by the leading practitioners AND their extensive sharing of this information along with the reasons why - the only way that I know it - the standard fitness advice as witnessed every 45 minutes at every mainstream gym, is still, - "warmup with 5 minutes on the rowing machine or treadmill."

Good to go.

Which, given what we know above, can be easily translated to read: "Fuck you, client"

How do we know this is the standard advice dispensed? Well, if it weren't - many of you wouldn't be reading this article thinking, "25 minutes warming up sounds like a bit much', you would have stopped reading it after the first paragraph thinking, 'no shit'.

Although the fault here ultimately lies with those getting paid to know better, unfortunately, this can still be traced back to the training institutions rubber-stamping them. Beyond this, most are not interested in overturning decades of misinformation and societal conditioning. Not interested in meeting the resistance of a client who's telling them they just want to get on with it. Not interested in being the expert they are paid to be, instead of cheerleading their clients through practices they know, or should know, to be less than ideal, or patently wrong.

Which means the onus is on you. If your warm-up doesn't, at least broadly, resemble that detailed above, first, check yourself. Is it you that is resistant to the idea and, if so, what makes you the special snowflake exception to the rule?

Once you wisely decide you are cool with it, then you might apply some heat to your trainer. Ask them, blowtorch optional, to explain why they fall outside the well-established best practice in their industry? Do they even know what that is?

I suppose there is some chance they are a trailblazer and privy to some secret knowledge we will ultimately all end up following. I doubt it. And should they direct you to a treadmill, you'll know it.

Every warm-up presents us with an opportunity to learn. We begin each in a different physical and mental state from the session before. At Leftfield, for each training block the warm-up changes with the program, but within this time, it is a constant, providing a useful reference point from which we develop an increased awareness and sensitivity to what's going on both at that session and in our wider lives.

Am I squatting deeper, twisting further?

Is this easier than last week?

This seems more difficult than normal... why?

Beyond merely raising the temperature, the consistency of these warm-up and power modules has a cumulative and compounding effect on our wider health and quality of life. We leave the body well primed for what is coming, but, as always, the body will take its lead from the mind.

If we approach it as a bit of a yawn before the real stuff - then we'll be sorely lacking the coordination, sharpened reflexes, responsive muscles, and shot of adrenaline that will help to make a training session, safer, more productive and far more enjoyable.

Without a comprehensive warm-up your body you will operate nowhere close to it's potential. If not working to potential, why would it adapt? If you won't adapt, what are you training for? Skipping the warm-up is a false economy, do the maths. Yeah, you just saved yourself twenty five minutes. And wasted the thirty straight after.

Download your own 6-Stage Warmup guide HERE

LEFTFIELD TRAINING

Drawing the Heat: How to nail your warm-up

So what's the point then?

The Blowtorch

Further reading: