Maximize Your Workout: The Essential Over 40 Warm-Up Guide

Maximize Your Workout: The Essential Over 40 Warm-Up Guide

I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve heard that you need to warm up before exercise. But did you know that the first 10 minutes of your workout play the biggest role in keeping your body healthy and avoiding an injury?

That’s right. While the warm-up may seem boring and like something that can be skipped over it can have big rewards for your body and will ensure that you get the most out of your workouts. Too often people think jumping on the cardio equipment for a few minutes followed by some quick stretches is warming up, but by not doing a proper warm up you are doing your body a disservice.

The goal of the warm-up is to prepare the body for what’s about to come by increasing blood flow and body temperature, loosening, and lubricating joints, waking up your muscles so that they can perform at their best, improving posture, correcting movement inefficiencies, and stretching your muscles through a full range of motion. This all leads to a better workout and preventing injuries in the workout and everyday life.

There are six components of a warmup to include every time:

1. Foam Rolling. Begin with 3-5 minutes of soft tissue work, preferably foam rolling. This will help to loosen tight muscles and improve the quality of the muscle tissue, preventing injury. Areas to focus on foam rolling are the back, IT Band, Quads, Hamstrings, and bottoms of the feet (use a tennis ball). Many of these areas will hurt at first, but after doing them for a few sessions they will begin to feel better.

2. Hip Mobility & Stability. We all sit too much throughout the day which leads to tight hip flexors and a weak, flat butt. This is why we want to stretch out the hip flexors and wake up the butt, aka the glutes, with a couple of stretch and exercises.

3. T-Spine and Shoulder Mobility & Stability. Our goal here is to open up those slouched shoulders. Again, due to the amount of time spent sitting each day our shoulders tend to start slouching forward and our heads move forward wreaking havoc on our posture. To address this, we open the chest and stretch out those tight muscles and then turn on our upper back muscles to pull our shoulders back and down. When you address this each time you warm up, you will begin to notice that you stand taller and do not carry as much tension in your neck and shoulders.

4. Core Engagement. Turning on the core gives us a strong base of support for all movement, and a strong core means we have a strong healthy body – after all, our core is what holds everything together. But again, our sedentary lifestyle has us sitting with bad posture, so our core tends to get weak. By addressing this with 1-2 exercises in the warmup, we are able to re-engage the core so that it can properly do its job.

5. Total-Body Movements. In each warmup, we like to include 1-2 total body bodyweight movements like a squat, lunge, or push up. This gets some full body movement and directly preps your body for what is about to come.

6. CNS Excitation. And finally, we want to charge up the body. The same way that a computer or generator needs to power up, so does our body. We like to do this through a circuit we call Jump, Throw, Carry. This circuit turns everything on and gets the muscles ready to work. The Jump, Throw, Carry circuit consists of some type of a jump movement for 3-5 reps, we like Squat Jumps and Broad Jumps, but this will depend on fitness level. Followed by a medicine ball throwing exercise for 5 reps. And finally, finish with a Carry, we like Farmer’s Carries for 50 yards. This circuit is repeated for two rounds.

This may sound like a lot, but it only takes about 8-12 minutes to do a warmup like this, and your body will thank you.

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