How To Warm Up Before Exercise And Avoid Injury: Do's And Don'ts

When you decide on your new gym program, you’re eager to get started, to get fit, and maybe to get ripped. All guns blazing, you walk into the gym, ready to hit your first exercise with a vengeance and to keep going. But you’ve missed one thing – your warm up. That's going to come back to bite you. Here's how to get it right.

Warming Up – The Dont’s

Everyone knows the importance of a warm up before a workout session – it helps get your blood flowing, warms up your muscles and joints and above all helps to prevent injury.

Not only that though, but the time you spend warming up is a great opportunity to get yourself mentally prepared for the session that lies ahead of you. It’s a chance to run through any last details you need to go over, lets you picture how the workout’s going to happen, and helps you get yourself psyched up.

Read More: 7 Stretching Exercises You Should Perform

The trouble is though, that too many people simply see warming up as a waste of time. Even those who do take the time and are diligent enough to go through a warm up routine usually do it half heartedly, and even more do it completely wrong.

Warming up isn't a simple case of plodding away on the treadmill while you wait for your workout partner to turn up, or sitting on a yoga mat running through a few stretches. Not only are you wasting your time doing these, you could be doing more harm than good.

In fact, that’s the perfect place to start – let’s talk about what not to do in your warm up.

Cardio

Yep – what you've been hearing all these years is wrong – cardio is not the best way to warm up.

There’s nothing inherently bad about doing cardio, it’s just a waste of time. Getting your heart rate up and increasing the synovial fluid around your joints, to help lubricate them, is all well and good, but this can be done without cardio.

Doing cardio before your weight training can be detrimental. You’ll sap your energy stores, increase your risk of fatigue and injury, and won’t get the benefits of the favorable changes in blood pH and hormones, as well as the increased afterburn effect that come from lifting weights first.

Static Stretching

Yep, that’s common myth number two busted.

While your gym probably has posters adorning every wall, advising you on what stretches to do for what body parts before you start your workout, stretching will actually inhibit performance.

By stretching and lengthening your muscles, your strength can decrease. Plus, most people go through a very simplistic total body stretch session, when there may well be some muscle groups that don’t need stretching at all. A prime example of this is the upper-back.

You might currently stretch your upper back by reaching out in front of you like you’re hugging an imaginary tree as part of your warm up. While there’s nothing wrong with this stretch, 99% of people (particularly office workers) have very weak, loose lower backs, due to long periods of sitting slumped over a computer keyboard, so upper back stretches are completely useless and could be worsening your posture problems.

Day Dream

This is warm up crime number three.

Your warm up should be a time to focus, plan what you’re going to do in your workout and prepare for the challenges and hard work that face you in the coming hour or so. Don't think about anything other than your workout, and make sure you get your warm up right, too.

Let it Eat Into Your Workout Time

In a second we’ll run through what to do it a warm up, which should only take you five to 10 minutes at most. It can be tempting to elongate your warm up to get an easy ride, however. If you only have an hour to spare in the gym, you should get a good, solid 50 minutes to work your butt off in, following your warm up.

If you’re not in the mood for training, taking ages with your warm up is a great way to slack off and reduce your sweat time. Don’t be a workout-avoider – keep your warm ups brief and to the point.

The Perfect Warm Up

The perfect warm up combines something that raises your pulse, activities that improve your mobility, reduces your injury risk, improves performance and is specific to the activity you’re doing.

It has four components.

1. Dynamic Mobility

Dynamic mobility work combines stretching and cardio in such a way that you get warm, loosen up your muscles and avoid injury, but avoid the pitfalls of regular cardio and static stretching.

Read More: 8 Myths about Stretching

The best way to warm up dynamically is to pick a few basic moves that target your whole body through a thorough range of motion. You can choose any moves that you like, but a great combo is:

• Body weight squats, lifting your arms high overhead as you squat down

• Lunges, twisting to the side on every rep and alternating legs

• Pushups, holding the bottom stretched position for three seconds

• A pull-down or row using a resistance band

• Cross body mountain climbers. (In a pushup position bring your right knee toward your left elbow and back, then left knee toward your right elbow)

• Rolls to toe touches (Sit on the floor with your legs straight out in front and spread apart. Roll backward onto your upper back, then roll forward, reaching as close to your toes as you can.)

Perform 10 reps on everything with no rest in between. This will take a maximum of 90 seconds.

2. Static Stretching

But I said earlier NOT to static stretch, didn’t I?

I certainly did, but there are some instances where it’s okay. Namely if you have a muscle group that is particularly tight and may inhibit your performing certain exercises. Using our office worker as an example again, most of these guys have chronically tight hip flexors, pecs and adductors, which can limit their ability to squat, deadlift and bench press safely.

If you know you have a very tight muscle group or two, stretch them for 20 seconds each side before you begin your session. It will make all the difference.

3. Activation

Activation drills get your fast twitch muscle fibers going.

If you’re doing a lower-body session, perform five sets of three explosive squat jumps, broad jumps or box jumps. If it’s an upper body workout, five sets of three clap pushups will do the trick.

4. Specific Drills

Specific drills simply mean starting lighter on every exercise. So if your workout calls for you to perform five sets of eight squats with 175 pounds, your warm up would finish with your performing eight squats with 45 pounds, eight reps with 95 pounds, eight reps with 135 pounds, before starting your workout at the prescribed weight.

Give it a try, and track how your overall performance improves over time! You might be surprised — but only if you really put effort into your warm up!