Personal Trainer Tips for Warming Up and Increasing Mobility

Last week we talked about mindset when it comes to creating a workout program, and this week we want to follow up with the importance of mobility work and warming up. 

Since warm ups and mobility are movement based, within today’s blog we’re going to provide you with a guide to the video above, so you know where to go to find the warm ups you’d like to learn.

But first, let’s talk a little bit about the importance of mobility work and warming up. 

As you age, warming up becomes more and more important, and since we primarily work with busy professionals between the ages of 45-60, and retirees 60 and up, it’s especially important for our clients.

One of the important benefits of warming up is it increases your core temperature. There’s been some debate over how effective increasing your core temperature is over the years, but what most people do wrong is the hop on the treadmill to “warm up” for 15 minutes or longer and they burn up all their energy, or ATP, and it decreases their output on the exercise portion.

Recently, studies have shown that increasing core temperature will decrease risk of injury during your workout. If you are older than 40 years old, you do have to warm up for more than 2-3 minutes. As a rule, we like to warm up 10-15% of the total amount of time we plan to exercise, and often we ask our clients to come in 10-15 minutes before their training time to complete some of the warm ups we’ll go over today.

 Another benefit to warming up is it increases synovial fluid in your joints.In other words, it helps lubricate the joints for exercises, as well as increasing blood flow to muscles to prime the muscles for your workout. If you don’t warm up sometimes lifting the weight is heavier to do than if you did warm up. The reason why is because when you don’t warm up, your nervous system isn’t prepared for what you’re about to do. 

We call this the Muscle Mind Connection.

Now let’s get into HOW to warm up:

(4:00) Lower Body Dynamic Warm Ups

• (4:16) Leg Swings- forward, backwards, side to side

• (4:30) Hip CARS- controlled articular rotation

• (4:50) Toe Grab Squats

• (5:13) Lateral Lunges

• (5:27) Ice Cream Scoops

(6:15) Upper Body Dynamic Warm Ups

• (6:26) Half Kneeling Thoracic Rotations

• (7:27) Push Ups

• (8:03) Shoulder CARS

• (8:40) Scapular Retractions

• (9:53) Wall Angels

(10:30) Mobility, Stability & Modifications

• (10:57) Half Kneeling Thoracic Rotation Modifier (if you can’t get down on your knees)

• (11:22) Lumbar Rotation

• (11:49) Banded leg abductions, aductions, extensions, & flexions for stability

• (12:41) Banded shoulder flosses

• (13:00) Banded pull aparts

And if you’re not sure where to even start, your first step may be to find an exercise physiologist to guide you through your fitness journey!