Notes on Warmups
I've noticed over the years that people are often confused when leading
warmups. They're either haphazard, or random, or worse.
CAVEAT EMPTOR: There's a science to this stuff, called physical therapy (or
PT for short), which I have not studied. If you do know someone who
studies PT, by all means, ask them instead.
Until then, dave's observations.
Rule #1: Cold muscles don't
stretch.
If your muscles are cold, then all stretching will accomplish is getting
the blood to flow. Not much stretching will happen. But, if you do too
much warming up without stretching, then you'll strain muscles. So there's
a very fine line here.
Possibly the best way is for individuals to know themselves and do "get the
blood flowing" warmup before class, since there's so much variety between
people. (For instance, for myself, doing jumping jacks while cold just
strains my knees. For most people, they're excellent warmups.)
Rule #2: Stretch before
strengthen.
The most common error I see is that people lead exercises in such a manner
that they are trying to strengthen up a muscle before it has been warmed up
and stretched. For instance, if you try to do pushups before warming up
the arm muscles, you're do an excessive amount of tearing in the arms,
which is not particularly helpful.
Rule #3: Big muscles first, small
muscles second.
Start with big muscles. Big muscles are big because they're used all the
time: opening doors, standing, walking, etc. Small muscles are small
because they're not meant to handle a large load.
So if you start by warming up the big muscles, you'll start with muscles
that are already warmed up by everyday use, and you'll additionally wake up
smaller muscles near them.
The way I think of this is by starting in the center and working outwards.
This works especially well with leg muscles.
Rule #4: Know what an exercise is
supposed to accomplish.
By thinking about an exercise, you can usually figure out what the point of
it is. There are usually many different ways of accomplishing the same
thing. If the other ways are safer (for individuals and groups), then
strongly consider using the alternatives. Safety usually involves injury
prevention: either not straining something in your own body, or the risk of
injury from working with another person.
Rule #5: X sets of Y reps is better than
1 set of X*Y reps.
For strength building, the point is to have the muscles fail in a
controlled manner. The first set of reps merely tires out the muscle: it's
only at the end that they are starting to fail. Much beyond that point,
they're constantly failing, and not much is happening.
Varying exercises so that you can return to a muscle group can be tricky,
due to warmup issues, and also because you can simply overtax the aerobic
response (although this generally recovers very quickly).
If you have suggestions on other rules, or questions on these, by all
means, drop me a line.
David Leung
Fri Sep 5 20:41:03 EDT 2003