| Mason Murphy / CG Instructor |
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Hello Camp Gladiator and congrats again on finishing up a great camp. I am extremely excited about and looking forward to our next camp starting Feb 23 and hope to see you all there. So the question that I challenge you with this newsletter is, “How do we properly prepare our bodies to perform safely and efficiently for our workouts?” There appears to be a bit of confusion on this topic as it is all too common to see people do this incorrectly. How many times can you recall watching someone enter the gym or arrive at boot camp and immediately sit down on the ground and begin to stretch their legs in a variety of ways in an effort to "loosen up"? This type of stretching is called "static stretching" and refers to stretching or lengthening a muscle by holding a position for ‘X’ number of seconds in an effort to loosen a muscle. If this type of stretching is going to be employed at all, it should be reserved for after a workout, or at least once the body/muscles are thoroughly warm. Performing static stretching prior to a workout when your muscles are "cold" and lack ample blood flow puts the muscles at risk of tearing and should be avoided at all cost. Besides the risk of injury involved, it is not even an efficient method of lengthening a cold muscle and preparing it for exercise.
Instead of static stretching, we need to prepare our bodies through movement with active dynamic stretches. This is a much safer, more effective, and natural way to not only lengthen our muscles, but also flood the muscles with blood, warming them and preparing them for work. It's important to understand that when a certain muscle is being worked or contracting, the muscle opposite the working muscle is relaxing and being stretched. An example of this would be an exercise called high kicks. This involves keeping one foot on the ground while keeping your other leg straight and "kicking" it out in front of you, alternating legs for twenty or so reps. In this exercise, the hip flexors contract causing the leg to raise up while the hamstring, which is opposite the hip flexors, are forced to relax and stretch through its natural range of motion.
This same example of a muscle contracting and its opposite muscle relaxing can be applied for most muscles throughout the body. One more example of this is an exercise called the "superman". This exercise involves lying in a prone position and raising your arms, shoulders, and legs off the ground so that only your torso is in contact with the ground. It is an excellent exercise for strengthening nearly every muscle on the backside of the body. Hamstrings, glutes, back extensors, and many upper back muscles to name a few, are contracting and working very intensely to bring the body into a state of extension while the front side of the body is relaxing and being stretched. The front of your shoulders, chest, abs, hip flexors, and quads are some of the muscles that are being stretched in a safe and natural way during this exercise.
To conclude, it’s important to understand and begin thinking about what exactly it means to warm up the body for exercise. Our main objective during a warm up is to prepare the body for maximal movement, effort, and intensity. Exercises such as sprinting or lifting a 25 lb sandbag over our heads during a squat and press are examples of exercises that are performed often at Camp Gladiator and are high intensity exercises that require a lot of our bodies. A thorough warm-up consisting of active dynamic exercises that, through gradually increasing in intensity movements, increase our core temperature and range of motion in every joint that will effectively and safely prepare our bodies for the workout of a lifetime. In other words, it will prepare us for Camp Gladiator. |
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