Weight Training: Warming Up Gets You Much Better Results
How many times have you ever gone to the gym and started lifting weights immediately without warming up? I know I have, as a bad a practice as it is. After one or two injuries related to not warming up properly, I’ve now made it a habit to always warm up.
You will have a much more effective workout when you take the time to warm up properly. The two main reasons why you should warm up are
a) It increases the amount of weight your body can handle.
b) It significantly reduces your chances of getting injured when you lift the heavier weights.
I recommend structuring your warm up into 3 short parts. Start with a light cardio routine. Five minutes on the stairmaster, treadmill or cylcle machine should be sufficient. Make sure you do not exert yourself during this phase. You will want to conserve all your energy for the actual workout. Too often I see people doing cardio vigorously, dripping in sweat and then proceeding to workout. When you do this you have little left to give during the weight lifting phase.
This stimulates your heart and lungs and triggers the secretion of synovial fluid which lubricates your joints. Synovial fluid is a viscous egg-yolk-like fluid that sits between your joints. It helps reduce friction during moment.
After you complete cardio, next you will want to stretch thoroughly. Don’t simply go through the motions and breeze through this. Make sure you feel a little tension in the muscle but no pressure on the joints. There are wrong and right ways to stretch and the proper form is illustrated in the link below. Stretching is often overlooked by most body builders but can make a significant difference in how great your workout will be.
Once you complete the stretches use light weights to exercise your target muscle groups. This is the third and final part of the warm up phase. It is not necessary to do this for all the muscles-just the ones you will be hitting that day. If you’ll be doing chest and back, do chest and back exercise with extremely low poundages and several repetitions.
In summary stretch the whole body and lightly exercise the muscle group of the day using compound exercises with low weights. Also try and keep focus on what you are doing the whole time. Avoid chit chatting and other distractions that lengthen you time in the gym. The mission is to always spend fifteen minutes warming up and an hour on the workout. Any more than that is counter productive.
Cardio is relatively less mind intensive than any of the other things you will ever do in the gym so use this time to do ‘theater of the mind’ exercises and imagine yourself already in possession of the body you want. This isn’t mumbo jumbo voodoo science by the way. Visualization is a proven powerful technique for attaining success of any kind.
To recap what I just said in one sentence: You ABSOLUTELY MUST warm up before working out if you want to maximize muscle gain and avoid injuries.
By Don Demarco. Don is a fitness enthusiast and writer. Enroll for a FREE muscle building course visit Ultimate Men’s Workout . Also see Men’s Workout Stretches . http://www.MensWorkoutHeaven.com
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