Leaders, Innovators, and Mentors in the Fitness Industry
Today, I’m am going to share with you my biggest influences in the fitness industry. These are the people I respect for their knowledge and for how they’re pushing their business forward. Not to mention, the blogs I read every…almost every day.
First and foremost, my personal coach, or at least I follow his programming, which may I mention is FREE on his big dawg’s blog, which is crazy, considering how much people would pay for this information,
Optimum Performance Training – James Fitzgerald
The Best Warm-Up
Quick, what should you do to warm up before working out?
10 minutes on the bike? NOPE
A few arm swings, leg circles, and jumping jacks? NOPE
A warm up set of 50% of the weight you’re gonna use for your first set? NOPE
The best warm-up you can possibly do is one that
- elevates core body temperature
- elevates cardiorespiratory rate (ie. heart rate, breathing, etc)
- increase ROM in all joints, planes of movement
- relaxes, stretches tight muscles, activates dormant muscles (ie. glutes)
- prepare neuro-muscular system for proper recruitment of movement patterns
Crossfit Journal has a better warm-up than the aforementioned warm ups that most people do at commercial gym settings. The Crossfit warm-up consists of (Samson stretch, overhead squat, sit-up, back extension, dip)
But I think we can do better, for the majority of us, there is much more mobilization work and activation drills we need to do before we do any of those movements. We need to make sure every joint is mobilized and has increased range of motion, as well as recruit the muscles that we are going to use in our workout. Most of us have tight hip flexors and don’t know how to fully fire our glutes. Therefore, it’s imperative that we fix both those issues in our warm-up. Do the following general warm up and you’ll feel better during your work out and in the long run
8-10 minutes of full body soft tissue work (foam roller, lacrosse ball)
Dynamic Warm-Up/Mobilization
3 rounds of:
ankle mobility
10 x leg swings
hip flexor stretch
Cook hip lift
5 x split squats, 5 x lateral squats, 5 x rotational squats
10 x wall slides
Big X band
After the dynamic warm-up, practice a few reps of all the movements that you are going to do in your particular work out.
Hopefully I’ve shed some light on the topic. So the next time you are confused on how to warm up, use this as a template.
Fuzz…
Look. You’ve got to take care of your tissues. This is probably second in importance only to the universal “protect your crotch” law. Stretching or mobilizing your tight business is always a good idea, but in reality as about as sexy as laundry and taxes.
But, really, who cares if your performance suffers, or you get pulled into terribly technique poor positioning, or are really weak at the end ranges of your range of motion, or you are wearing out your joint surfaces?
Enter the Fuzz Concept.
Maybe, you will start stretching because you just don’t like the concept of “fuzz” accumulating in your tissues. Fuzz you ask? I have a fuzz problem? What the fuzz? Gil Hedley, rockstar anatomist, makes an excellent case and presents a compelling hypothesis for internal muscular resistance. You can think of muscular “stiffness” as a measure of how well the muscle tissue (and other connective tissues) slide past one another. The more stiffness, the greater the internal resistance of the system. Increased internal resistance means decreased efficiency and lost power output. (We actually talk about this at the Movement and Mobility Seminar.) Dr. Hedley describes the formation of fuzz as secondary to immobility (like sleeping). As an aside, Leopards do stretch by the way, and you aren’t a leopard–so quit using the “leopard defense” to rationalize your stiff/tight self. Know what makes even more fuzz accumulate in your body? Muscle damage. That’s right. Working out.
Go ahead, say something witty you fuzz collector.
Now watch the man himself describe the fuzz epidemic.
Taken from http://sanfranciscocrossfit.blogspot.com/2010/04/two-wordsfuzz.html