 |
Stretching versus warming up versus loosening up…
I have a lot of students who come into class, usually that have trained somewhere else, that want to stretch before their workout. Sounds reasonable, right? WRONG! People often confuse "stretching" with "warming up" and they use the terms interchangeably when in fact, they are two completely different things. I wanted to take a second to address this in plain English, without the technical jargon that the spandex warriors usually throw at you.
Just so we're clear, you should ALWAYS warm-up before a workout. The problem is when people start to warm up, they'll usually go right into basic stretching that we all learned back in high school gym class. That is not warming up. Warming up is slowly raising the temperature of the muscles you plan on using during your training. The best way to do this is by actually doing the same techniques you'll do in your training, only in a slower, controlled fashion.
For example, I usually have people start off by practicing basic footwork – moving forward, moving back, side-to-side, circling and hard pivoting. This serves two purposes. First, you can never practice footwork enough and it often gets overlooked. Second, it allows you to slowly warm-up the muscles that you'll be using in the actual training. After this, you can go into some slow punching, focusing on the technique, throw some kicks, lower and slower than you normally do, etc. Again, you're going slow, focusing on the techniques. This will warm you up AND improve your technique. Other great warm-ups are jumping rope, slower shadowboxing, etc.
Now, it's time for stretching, right? Not so fast. The other thing people get confused on is stretching to loosen up versus stretching for flexibility. Before a workout, (after the warm-up) the only stretching that should be done is very light loosening up. This would consist of stretching just until you barely feel any tension and only holding it for a few seconds. Things like bending down to touch your toes, picking your knees up into your chest, a couple of low leg swings, hurdlers stretches, etc. can all be done but shouldn't go past your natural flexibility.
During the warm-up and stretching (loosening), you should try to hit all the muscle groups that you'll be using in your training and making sure to rotate all your joints. Basically, when you do something hard and fast, it shouldn't be a wake-up call for any part of your body.
Now, for those of you with flexibility issues or who just want to increase their range of motion a little, there is stretching for flexibility. This type of stretching should be done at THE END of your training. At this point, your body temperature is at it's highest and you'll get the most gain out your stretching with less chance of hurting yourself. For this type of stretching, you can use the same stretches you did at the beginning of your workout. The only difference is now you can push yourself a little deeper into the stretch and hold it a little longer. This is the best (safest) way to increase your flexibility and it's also a great way to cool down before stepping out of the gym and sucking in that cold air.
Train hard… harder!
Bob Barnum
412-823-7538
5:06 AM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|