Warm Up with Purpose ! - CrossFit Epically Awesome

How do you prepare for your workout? Do you have a normal routine that you follow based on the workout for the day or do you go into your warmup with mindless thoughts and just wish it would end? If you’re like most people, you come into the gym, spend a couple of minutes on the rower or the Airdyne, do some dynamic stretching, air squats, push ups, and ta-da !!! You’re good to go…. however you might want to start to think of tweaking your routine just a little bit.

The mindset you bring to your warm up has a big impact on your performance. If you approach your warm up with a purpose, your training day will reach a completely different level.Structuring a warm up is important for developing this purpose. We can divide that structure into five distinct stages.

1- WHY??

First answer this question: Why are you here today ? The most important phase of the warm up starts in your head. It begins when you see the workout for the day and start to evaluate and review your goals. If something is not right in front you such as your performance or goal tracking, understanding the why can be hard. That’s why it’s important to keep our goals in front of us all the time.

2- WHAT??

After answering the why, it’s important to answer the what. What are you hoping to accomplish in this session? There are usually so many different elements during a training session that it can be difficult to focus. Think of the skill, gymnastics and workout. However, if we focus on just one element, it changes the dynamic completely. Answering the what question gives us a small daily goal to work towards. The continual accumulation of these little goals will eventually take us where we want to go. This strategy gives us small victories to celebrate every single day.

3-Warm Up

The general warm up separates you from the outside world and tells your mind and body that training has started. It’s the time when you leave everything behind and shift your focus to the why and what. I want you to think that the warm-up should be the jump start to your training. Its a switch that you learn to control. The switch turns off everything else in the outside world and brings your attention to the task at hand.

4-Stretch and Get Mobile

The problem that usually happens is that people don’t see the reason behind the mobility part of the warm-up. This leads to people not spending enough time working on the areas that need the most attention. How many times have you seen an athlete walk in the gym, grabs a band, spends twenty seconds in a single position, and they think that they’ve mobilized that joint or area for the day. Well, I’ve got some bad news for you. You didn’t mobilize anything, and you just wasted a good twenty seconds of your life.

5-Work on YOUR own warm-up routine

The warm up is an important stage of your training that should not be taken lightly. Approaching the warm up with a purpose is a habit anyone can develop, but it will take time and dedication. Think about what your doing for the day an what you need to focus on. It’s a little silly to be stretching your arms if it’s a leg dominate day doesn’t it ? Learn how to focus in on what you are doing and find a routine that can help you.

Recently, I have been working on becoming more flexible and adding in dynamic exercises to enhance the movements I am going to do in that training session. You need to do what works for you but make sure you know your WHY and WHAT when you are doing it !

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