The Truth Behind Warmups
We all have muscle imbalances due to modern day habits. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has their own specific overactive and underactive muscles. I think we can all agree that modern day humans are not the most active individuals outside of the gym…. if they even workout at all. We’re all glued to our phones, sitting at desks, driving, and pretty much doing ALLLLLL the sitting possible. This means – underactive glutes, abdominals, and possibly other muscles depending on that person’s particular movement habits throughout the day. This also means – overactive hip flexors, upper back and traps, chest, etc.
Think of overactive muscles as our “bossy” muscles. They compensate for the sleepy muscles and try and do their job as well as their own. Underactive muscles are our “sleepy” muscles are the and are always elongated or “stretched out”. They suck at doing their specific job.
“Bossy” muscles are the muscles that we need to stretch and foam roll before workouts in order to encourage them to relax. “Sleepy” muscles need to be “woken up” before workouts and reminded of the job that they should naturally be doing. We do this by performing isolation exercises for those muscles in order to activate them.
As we continue to avoid addressing all of these issues, the closer we bring ourselves to injury and pain. However, the more we can focus on these problems, the better we are going to move and feel throughout the day.
Now, let’s go back to how people warmup today. I think we can all agree that warmups are important. However, do you think that doing a full body stretch would be beneficial to your workout? I mean, it’s stretching, and stretching is good, right?? Well, you’ve definitely encouraged your overactive muscles to chill out, however; you’ve told your underactive muscles to elongate and relax EVEN MORE than they already are. This would actually HURT your workout and movement rather than help it. What about not warming up at all? Obviously, that’s a stupid idea, but most of us are guilty of this.
So, let’s look at some examples. Bob works as an accountant and sits for the majority of the day. He rushes to the gym after work and skips his warmup because, why would he waste time on it? Now, during his workout his overactive muscles continue to take over the job of other muscles and his underactive muscles continue to not do shit. He’s basically teaching his body to move incorrectly over and over and over and over and over again… and adding weight while he’s doing it. Sounds extremely safe… He’s eventually going to injure himself in some way, and then he’ll be out for a good 6 months because he hurt his back and has no idea why. That example is obvious.
Now, what if Bob comes to the gym after work, takes time to warmup but does an entire full body stretch and begins? SAME THING. He’s addressed his overactive muscles by stretching them out, BUT he has done nothing to help his “sleepy muscles”. These muscles need to be told to kick their ass in gear for the workout. If not, they are going to continue to do what they do during the entire day outside of the gym – NADA. So, now Bob is continuing to teach his body to move the wrong way over and over and over again.
And finally, what if Bob comes to the gym, runs for a random amount of time, and then knocks out some push ups before the workout for his warmup? Well, he’s now successfully taught his body how to run incorrectly while also increasing the problem that is his overactive chest muscles from sitting all day.
Warmups neeeeeed to make sense. I cannot emphasize this enough. Rarely will you ever see someone warming up correctly at a gym. It’s WILD. Most people don’t warmup at all, or they just pick a bunch of random shit to do, which actually makes their movement patterns WORSE rather than helping them. Just because you’re stretching and/or foam rolling and increasing your heart rate doesn’t necessarily mean you’re benefitting your body.
MORAL OF THE STORY - you absolutely need to know what muscles (specific to YOU) are underactive and which are overactive. Based off of that assessment, you need to program a personalized warmup for yourself that includes foam rolling, stretching, and isolation exercises. And if this warmup takes 15 minutes, and you only have 60 minutes to workout, don’t skip that shit. You’re way better off and you’ll actually progress MORE by taking 15 of those 60 minutes to properly prime your body than if you were to just workout the entire 60 minutes. If you're unsure how to figure this out, hire a professional that does and who can teach you how to utilize that knowledge long-term. It's worth the investment. Work smarter, not harder.