The warm-up is often the most important and most often overlooked parts of a training session. Why is it so important? A warm-up often acts as barometer of your physical state there and then on the day. People often just rush through it without taking stock of how you feel. It is an opportunity to prime yourself for the activity to come, however many only see the value in proper warm-up strategy usually when they are working around some sort of ‘problem’. Be prepared and it may just help you have far more productive workouts. In the video I discuss how we approach warming up in brief.

Warming up for the most part is a 4 stage process.

1. Mental Prep – Psychological prep – Pre-anticipatory response.

2. Getting Warm – Increased body temperature.

3. Mobility -Improve joint lubrication and flexibility.

4. Warm-up sets. – Engage the nervous system to a greater degree.

Key points from the video

‣Take stock of how you feel, go over your planned workout question your readiness.
‣Initially warm-ups need a jumping off point from a video or a coach, be sure to have it written down, then look to do some informed freestyle.
‣My intro warm-up is, Highknees, Marches, Knee Circles, Spiderman +reach, Roll-up to sit out, Supported Squat (all x 10) and selected foam rolling and stretching as needed.
‣When learning to warm-up start with something very general such as Joe D Franco’s Agile 8 as you become more experienced you explore other movements and overcome your own imobility and prepare personally for what ever you are doing that training session.
‣Don’t spend too long or get too abstract with your mobility, don’t forget you still have to lift!
‣Too few warm-up sets and you’ll be too tired, too few and you won’t achieve optimal activation.
‣The heavier you plan to go the more warm-up sets you need but the fewer reps you should probably do.
‣When doing power work at lower percentages we often warm-up to a heavier load for a single or double for potentiating effect.

This is an ongoing series of blog posts from William Wayland of Powering Through, who works with UFC and other high level combat athletes based in Chelmsford, UK Twitter. Facebook