Health, Fitness and Beauty

Do you do one of the most important things before your work out? Do you warm up sufficiently before hitting the weights? While it is tempting to just start lifting, there is a scientific basis for the need to warm up before subjecting your body to a grueling work out.

Warming up makes your workouts more effective thereby maximizing muscle growth. Chief among the benefits of warming up are:

a) It increases the amount of weight your body can handle.

2. Reduces the risk of injury to your joints and muscles.

I recommend structuring your warm up into 3 short parts. Start with a light cardio routine. Five minutes on the stairmaster, treadmill or cylcle machine should be sufficient. Make sure you do not exert yourself during this phase. You will want to conserve all your energy for the actual workout. Too often I see people doing cardio vigorously, dripping in sweat and then proceeding to workout. When you do this you have little left to give during the weight lifting phase.

Doing light cardio exercise causes synovial to be secreted. Synovial is a fluid which lubricates the joints and reduces friction whenever there is movement. A good amount of this makes your workout ‘frictionless’ if I may use that term!

After you complete cardio, next you will want to stretch thoroughly. Don’t simply go through the motions and breeze through this. Make sure you feel a little tension in the muscle but no pressure on the joints. There are wrong and right ways to stretch and the proper form is illustrated in the link below. Stretching is often overlooked by most body builders but can make a significant difference in how great your workout will be.

The last part of the warm up phase is light exercise on the muscles that you will be working out that day. If it is a leg day, for example, do squats and dead lifts with a really light weight. Once this is done, the heavy lifting can commence.

Again, do a whole body stretch but warm up sets for just the muscle groups that you are targeting on that day. Ideally your work out should last no more than 15 minutes. Always try to maintain laser focus on what you have planned so that you minimize the time spent in the gym, spending no more than 75 — 90 minutes total for each training session. One way of enhancing this focus is to visualize powerfully during the cardio part of the workout.

Cardio is relatively less mind intensive than any of the other things you will ever do in the gym so use this time to do ‘theater of the mind’ exercises and imagine yourself already in possession of the body you want. This isn’t mumbo jumbo voodoo science by the way. Visualization is a proven powerful technique for attaining success of any kind.

In summary, resist the temptation to rush into the gym and just hit the weights. A proper warm up will pay immense dividends for you in both the short and long term.