Warm Up Window

A good warm up must accomplish several taks:

1) Raise Heart Rate and Repiration Rate
2) Raise Core Body Temperature
3) Prepare connective tissue and muscle for dynamic movement
4) Prime the Nervous System
5) Grease key movement motor pathways (deadlifting needs hammy activation)
6) Prime dominant metabolic pathways and shift blood away from the stomach and gut
7) Increases Cardiac pre-load by returning venous blood pooling.

Right. Enter the famous Crossfit warmup of squatting, pushups, lunging, pullups, situps, etc. Which by the way is much, much better than five minutes of "ellipticalling". But the warmup can be so, so much more.

The famous Romanian Gymnastics coach Bella Karoli is alleged to have let his male athletes warm up with some indoor soccer. He felt that his athletes had more fun doing it, performed better in practice, and still were prepped for the rigors of their sport.

Clearly no one should engage in full out combat as warmup, but movement preparation can be spent in a slightly more creative and effective way than squat, pushup, rinse, repeat. Too often our veteran athletes cruise in, grab a jump rope, do some shoulder dislocates and squat a few times. For the sake of full disclosure it should be noted that we usually engage in a formal group warmup. But when we see the former happen, we feel, how should we say, Wonh, Wonh, Wonh.

Warm up is a time to work on skills. It's a time to practice unloaded technical variations of the movements to come. And as the goals of warm up start getting met (see the list above), it's time to have a little fun doing something "you suck at".

So go figure out that if you are front squatting for example, you may need to prep your hips a little more than a few bodyweight squats will accomplish. And you need to go work on your handstands. Oh and if you have tight hips, you'd better do a little extra!

So, make sure you are really ready for hard work, make it fun, and for Pukie's sake banish the rote, dogmatic, warm up routine.

Check out the gang getting their two handed anyhow on. Then they ran, played tug of war, did some burbpees, THEN worked out.

Coach Kstar