By taroThe Best Workout Warm-up
The Best Workout Warm-up
Warm up proctocols are the current hot topic in the field of exercise. Everyone espouses their own special workout-readiness recipe. Some of the most common rituals include foam rolling and other self-myofascial release modalities, mobility drills, stretching, light cardio, sprinting and plyometrics.
This plethora exists due to undefined or confounding goals. Some warm-up goals include:
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injury prevention
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physiological readiness
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emotional readiness
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nervous system arousal
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technical rehearsal
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range of motion readiness
For the purposes of injury prevention and maximizing performance, muscle activation should serve as the foundation of all warm-up proctocols. Everyone has a muscle recruitment bias which dictates the preferential recruitment of certain muscles over others. Essentially, half the muscles of your body are relatively hyperactive and half are relatively underactive. This imbalance results in uneven stress distribution. Injuries most often occur when muscles finally cross a stress threshold – a threshold that would not have been reached with balanced activation levels.
Warm-ups featuring the activation of your weak muscles would be the gold standard in injury prevention. Stay tuned to this website or come to the Tarodo Practicums to learn how to identify your muscle recruitment bias and reduce the number of training days lost due to injury!