This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 1:22 am and is filed under Core Performance, Performance Stretching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
A general warm-up involves exercising muscle groups of the body under light or minimal loading. These movements should be general in nature and not related to movements in the workout, training session, or activity. A general warm-up is everything it says it is, just nice easy light flowing warm up to get the blood circulating.
Some examples of a general warm-up are jumping jacks, riding a stationary bicycle, skipping or light calisthenics. Warm-ups should be intense enough to increase the body core temperature and cause minimal perspiration (sweating) but not fatigue. A nice thorough warm-up will improve performance and your conditioning. Here is a list of some of the benefits:
- Increased rate of strength of muscle contraction
- Increased metabolic rate
- Increased muscle coordination through related movements
- Increased work capacity/anaerobic activity
- Reducing the risk of injury
- Psychological benefits
Following your general warm-up, you should include a flexibility routine. Flexibility exercises are those exercises that increase the range of motion of a joint. These exercises should immediately follow your warm-up because the increase in the tissue temperature will make the stretching both safer and more productive. “Cold muscles” injure very easily and stretching them before they are warm can produce tearing injuries. Which is the very last possible scenario we want to happen.
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