Bodyweight Warm Up Workout

By Mike Thiga author of The Muscle Experiment

Sports science has researched warming up extensively over the years and concluded that it readies the body and your nervous system for a tough workout. A good bodyweight warm-up is also able to eliminate any weak links in your body, improving your movement quality, resulting in more muscle and less injuries.

Many coaches instruct their athletes to spend the first ten minutes of every training session doing a carefully calculated collection of various activation drills, some dynamic stretches, and movement preparation, all specifically designed for optimal muscle performance.

It gets your blood flowing, clears any waste from the muscles, brings fluids into your joints, and helps to open your body up. Research also clearly shows that when warming up using dynamic stretches it will actively move all your joints through full range of motion, enhancing muscular performance.

It's like warming up your car, getting the right blend of different drills will set all your muscles and your joints into the right position and keep them safe. It starts with foam rolling first and progresses to a dynamic warm-up. A bit like a poor man's massage because it will remove knots, trigger points, and remove scar tissue that tend to accumulate in the body.

Over time, it'll restore the muscle's natural length and reduce any nagging aches or pains. Coaches explain that when an athlete hits a tender spot, it is recommended that he/she stays on that spot until it dissipates. Usually 8 to 10 rolls for each body part. A few minutes are also spent targeting the calves, the quads, the groin, the IT band, the glutes, the upper back, and the lats. When this is complete the dynamic warm-up starts.

Performance and strength for doing deadlifts, squats and bench-press is going to come from your glutes. The stronger your glutes are the stronger your deadlift, your squat, and you bench-press is going to be. When these muscles are weak, not warmed up correctly they will force all your nearby muscles to try to compensate, reducing your strength and increasing the chance of injuries.

Doing a movement like the Supine Bridge by lying on your back bending your knees 90-degrees and squeezing your glutes, driving through your heels as you raise your hips as you avoid tensing your hamstrings. This is just the start and should be done ten times.

Your adductors are those muscles inside of your thighs. Doing a warmup movement like the Split Stance Adductor Mobility will help to mobilize this important body-part. Start on all fours and then extend your right leg by 90-degrees to your right. Keeping your right leg straight, you then push your hips backwards, keeping your lower back arched. You'll feel a good stretch in your groin. Repeat 10 times, then change sides.

We cannot get sufficient mobility in the thoracic spine. Most people have a kyphosis, which is a rounded shoulders and upper-back that slump forward. This kyphosis can often cause shoulder problems as it inhibits your joint movement, causing your shoulder blades to bulge from the ribcage and spread apart.

If you do Quadruped Extension-Rotations you'll solve this problem by getting on all-fours, placing your right hand at the back of your head while you keep your left elbow solidly locked and immobile throughout the movement. You then stretch upwards to the ceiling as you feel the stretch in the thoracic spine. Pressing your left hand into the ground will accentuate this stretch.

Note: For more information checkout The Lost Secrets of Bodyweight Training