Dynamic warm-up. It’s the type of warm-up that you do where you are constantly moving. Keeping the body warm and elevating the heart rate. What this does is it prepares you for the activity you are about to do. For most people that are reading this blog, that would be exercising. Loosening up the hamstrings, glutes, calves, and back is vital to performing a squat and doing some dynamic warm-up will allow you to open up.
We tend to incorporate dynamic warm-up early in our small group classes to promote movement prior to moving on to the advanced exercises such as lunges or burpees (crowd favorite btw). Imagine a scenario where you start sprinting right away when the body is not warm. Think of what can happen. Pull a hamstring, a calf, or even worse, strain your Achilles tendon. Maybe you did that when you were in your teens, but I wouldn’t even do that with our young athletes. Its just not smart. The consequences outweigh the outcome.
Be smart in your approach.
If you analyze each dynamic warm-up, there’s a lot of range of motion involved and this is exactly what people need. When people squat, their back/hamstrings are so tight that they cannot go pass parallel. Limited range of motion means you are not getting the most out of your workout. In addition, some muscles may not activate. Squats should target quads, glutes, and hamstrings. However, if the range of motion is limited, most likely you are only targeting quads. This is bad because the back side (glutes and hamstrings) is what people REALLY need more of, strength and mobility.
My personal favorite is the hamstring crawls (check our Dynamic Warm-up playlist on YouTube). It really loosens up my hamstrings and low back. I like to do these in between my sets when I am squatting. The main purpose is to move better and that’s what the dynamic warm-ups are intended for.
Here are some great dynamic warm-up you can do before you start moving around. Hope you liked this week’s blog. Stay tuned for more next Wed…………………Kei