How to do Basic Warm Ups

Welcome everybody to another video coaching lesson from your six pack quest. I am Vince DelMonte and today we are going to be talking about functional warm ups. We are going to teach you how to warm up properly. A lot of warm ups make you weaker before you work out. They do not prime your nervous system and they do not get you specifically ready for what you are actually going to do on the gym floor. For example, warming up on a treadmill, on a bike on elliptical. It is okay to increase your core temperature but it is not going to send blood into your hips, into your shoulders, into the actual muscles that you are going to work out on the gym floor. So, I am going to show you a little series of exercises and I do require everyone of my workouts in substitution of five to ten minutes on the treadmill, and I am going to just work from the bottom up. We are going to start up from the calves. Everything we are doing is just kind of a combination of dynamic flexibility and functional flexibility, and we are going to focus on just moving through a variety of motions. And we are just going to break down any tight muscle tissue and let me just tell you. This is one of those things you just got to do for yourself, every person I have put through this warm up has told me that if I had better workouts. They felt safer, they felt more effective. Okay we are going to get going, we are going to start with the calves, work through the hamstrings then the hips then the glutes, base taking any static stretch and we are just having this emotion to it. I am just going to do three repetitions and go through this quickly for demonstration purposes but you can build up to, you do not even, just do as many as you need you, how you feel loose enough to hit the floor. Notice, I am going to watch my left foot. I am going to put it out here now, hit a different angle on my calf, this leg. We are going to hit a third angle on our calf and it is go across my body. Good. We have done our calves. We are going to move up into our hamstrings now, this fine leg here. We are going to just go back and forth, loosen up the ankle and what we are going to do is we are going to start leaning into it one at a time and we are going to move form side to side. So, we are going to stretch different angles up your hamstring, you flap back, find the tightest spot. On each one we are going to take it a little further. We are going to add some hip motion, to start loosening up your hips, breaking down our hamstrings. Now, we can even add some trunk cross over we start warming up our trunk. Notice that my ankle is going the opposite direction, up my trunk, we intensify that to lean into it. If you need to grab on to it. You can lean into it more, good. We go on to the next leg, some things warm up the ankle back and forth, move it forward. Now there is some hip motion, you might have people come up to you and ask you if you are doing ballet, just tell them Vinni told you to do this. Okay, get a little deeper, stretch at different angles on the hamstring, get into to abs trunk flexion sort of, it has some trunk rotation. Okay, good. We are going to work our hip flexes now. The same thing, bring it in one, two, three, one we are working here, if you are tightening our glutes you will feel it here as well. Good. We are going to take our leg out a little farther, enter a different angle. It is just really good for prime in the nervous system as well, you go across. Good. If you want, you can go back in this position and have your trunk rotation too. It helps you really break down any tightness in those hip flexors, lean into it, find the tension and just work through it. Focus on controlled rhythm, good. We are going to work into your glutes now, try and come up 90 degrees. If you got more flexibility you can bring your knee closer to the pole here, again lean into it. Good, take it at a little different angle, work a little deeper now into the glute. It is really good especially on your leg days, even before a hard cardio workout. I got a whole series of athletes doing these and these guys have told me that they feel phenomenal before they trained now and just because you are juicing up the nervous system, pumping blood into the actual areas of the bodies they are supposed to work and mentally they are getting in tune with how their body feels, too much static stretching before you work out tend to make you -- can make your muscles weak but at the same time it can make you mentally weak. Because when you are lying down stretching for a log period of time, who wants to go lift heavy weights or go work hard after you have been lying on a mat for twenty, thirty minutes. We are going to work the abductors now. One, two, three; other side, one, two, three, four. Okay. You could do this at different angles, you could be creative with this, as you could tell, there is not really a right or wrong way to do this. take any static stretch you know, add some movement in there and it is going to be far more effective than static stretching. It is going to be probably a lot safer than hard core ballistic or dynamic stretching. Five, ten minutes of this and you are going to be pretty warm as well. We want to work our quads. Alright, I am feeling really good, believe it or not I am starting to warm up. I am not sweating but when I am ready to hit the gym floor. Okay, guys that wraps up the warm up. Whether your goals are muscle building or fat loss. You can incorporate this in either goals whether you are a beginner, an advanced athlete. Again, I highly recommend you incorporate this warm up into your program especially substitution for doing a traditional cardio warm up on the treadmill or the bike but it only warms up your core body temperature. It does not prime your nervous system which is a key requirement for having a safe and effective workout. So, hope you enjoyed that, until next time. We will see you again from YourSixPackQuest.com.