Warm-ups and Workout Prep
Meaningful progress is achieved through consistency. If you are coaching classes, personal clients, or working out on your own, you MUST take advantage of your warm-up time. If you have a plan in place, you can consistently move the needle towards elite performance and living fit and pain-free for the rest of your life. The core of our workouts take care of our power, speed, strength, endurance, stamina, agility. Our warm-ups should
prepare our joints, tissues, and central nervous system for the day’s workout to push our daily performance higher,
activate motor patterns we are going to use that day and start focusing us back to the MovementLink, skil-transfer mindset,
include time to practice and improve technique, and
time-efficiently move the needle for our overall mobility and stability.
This sounds like a lot and we see programs all over the place do all of this in 45 minutes. If go into your warm-ups with a template, you can potentially get everything you need done in about 15 minutes. If you’ve got more time that day because of a shorter, higher intensity workout, you can spend a little more time in the prep phase.
Here’s the MovementLink Warm-Up Template
General Warm-up (5-15 minutes)
Start the process of doing everything with intent. Focus on your posture and link everything back to a squat, a push-up, and a jump. With the MovementLink framework, we actually need to link everything in our brains as we go. Our favorite thing to make fun of is the people doing “activation exercises” to “activate” their glutes because they don”t use them in their squat. They “activate” their glutes in the exercises, but then they squat in their old way with no glute activation. The key most are missing, is you can’t turn a muscle on and you can’t strengthen a muscle and expect it to magically incorporate itself back into an exercise. It is the motor pattern link that is everything. So, you need to “active” the muscle AND the motor pattern back through your posture, the squat, the push-up, and the jump. When EVERYTHING we do is a combination and a variation of these, then “activation” exercises may actually activate!
Get hot, sweaty, and out of breath.
Do 3+ minutes of general cardio exercises like run, bike, row. You can do butt kicks, high skipping, bear crawls, burpees, light thrusters.
You can get creative, especially if you are coaching a class, but, whatever you do, ramp up the intensity as you go and get out of breath.
Dynamically put your bodies through as many end range positions as possible. Some refer to this as primal movement, we like to refer to it as weird, yoga-ish movement. Consistency is king. 5-10 minutes of daily end range movement will have a much more efficient impact on your overall mobility than a few long mobility sessions a week.
Avoid static stretching in your warm-up. Static stretching before a workout is an old school method that can actually decrease performance through the decreasing our stretch-reflex and can potentially increase your risk of injury. We want to touch end range positions, but we don’t want to hang out there.
Be weird, but also be smart. You don’t have to only do perfect squats although after we hit weird positions we like to end with perfect positions. Our bodies need the ability to hit different angles of our muscles and joints. If you catch a snatch a little funky, your tissues and joints may be hitting sub-optimal positions, and we don’t want that to be the first time you’ve ever been there. We don’t load sub optimal positions, but we challenge our bodies to go in and out of them.
Watch our Just Move Follow Along videos for examples of what this weird, yoga-ish movement looks like in practice.
Specific Workout Prep
Now that we have generally gotten your body ready for exercise, it’s time to get more specific for the stresses your actually going to put yourself through in your workout. In our specific warm-up prep, we want to
Resolve or improve tissue and joint restrictions, stability, and movement dysfunction. If you know you have tight ankles, hips, shoulders, etc., we want to give the joint some love. This has immediate positive impacts for your day’s workout, but also, if we spend a couple of minutes working on a weakness every day, we can put the dysfunction behind us. We have example videos below and the joint distraction videos typically have the biggest impact for people with specific joint issues. We love pulling in some movements here that require balance, stability, and test your control in end range positions. Most of the videos on this page fit within this category. Challenge your body in a way that is similar to what you need to do in your workout. See the Movement and Mobility Workout Prep section below for more detail and videos.
Create a Focus for your training and practice it. Especially if you are coaching a class, this can be extremely powerful in getting your whole community to move better and improve their performance. Look at what you doing in the workout. Think about what you struggle with (knees in on a squat, overextending the back catching a snatch, shoulder’s coming out of position on kipping pull-ups, etc.) and let’s focus and practice something that can improve on the issue. Come up with some aspect of one or more of the movements you are going to do that day and come up with a way to practice. With your focus in mind, start warming up to and using the specific movements you are going to use in your workout. Here are some examples:
Knees in on a squat - Focus drawing your belly button in, holding a kegel, flexing your butt cheeks, and then creating torque in the hip through screwing your feet into the ground (right foot clockwise and left foot counter-clockwise). You can practice this with slow motion squatting and squatting with pauses at various positions allowing you to check in on your Get Tight Checklist. After some air squat variations, you can load it up with a barbell and continue. Add weight and/or speed with the focus.
Overextending the back catching a snatch - Focus on our Get Tight Checklist. Start with the progressions above for the knees in on a squat issues. When you add the barbell start with overhead squats. Then as you start warming up your snatch, pause on your catches (in the overhead squat position) and go through your Get Tight Checklist. Don’t move on until you are able to receive the bar and go through the Checklist without having to make any corrections.
Shoulders coming out of position on the kipping pull-up - Focus on the Get Tight Checklist and warm-up with push-ups. Remember, everything links back. You can then move on to some standing banded rows where you can really focus on creating torque in the shoulder as you pull the band towards you. Then you can hang from the pull-up bar and work on relaxing and then engaging to pull your shoulders away from your ears and twist your pinkies into the bar to create torque in your shoulder. You can work this into holding the engaged position and then little kip swings in the engaged position. Keep adding more movement with that focus until you are practicing your kipping pull-ups with that engaged shoulder.
We call this Technique Layering and there’s much more detail and videos in the Technique Layering section below.
Full Speed and Weight. This part is simple. Do reps of the movements you are going to use in your workout working up to the weight and speed required in your workout. Tie in your focus and keep that intent in mind on every rep. With classes, we like to generally use a 3 Rounds of 3 Reps format. Of course there are times when this format is not ideal, so this is just for an example. Round 1 you’d complete 3 reps of each exercise at the the weight and variation you’re going to do in the workout. Rounds 2 and 3 combine to make a “mini-WOD.” Complete 3 reps of each exercises for 2 rounds acting like it is “For Time.” Remember, quality reps are king, so we don’t get sloppy, we just move as fast as our technique allows.
So, it sounds like a lot because it is! BUT, it doesn’t take long and, when followed consistently, the MovementLink Warm-up Template will have a dramatic impact on your overall mobility, joint and tissue health, and consistently improve performance. The template will likely take you a little longer in the beginning as you learn it, but once you learn how to plan it out and streamline the process, you can get fully prepped for a workout in a very meaningful way in as little as 15 minutes.
Movement and Mobility Workout Prep
Core
Shoulders
Hips
Ankles
Play with Candlestick Rolls
Play
Technique Layering
Going beyond prepping muscles, joints, and positions with mobility and stability, Technique Layering can add a quick lesson and focus to improve technique as you are warming up the actual exercises you’ll use in the workout. When done correctly, the technique layering portion can add the extra skill transfer layer to your warm-up and workout that will build exponentially over time. For example, if you work technique only for the kettlebell swing, you are improving the kettlebell swing. But, if you work a technique in the kettlebell swing with the context of skill transfer, then we take advantage of the power of MovementLink and cleaning up balance on the feet in the kettlebell swing should transfer to the improving the clean, jerk, snatch, jumping, squatting, and everything else that uses the feet! Without extra time spent, that extra layer of technique focus in warm-ups on feet, ankles, core, hips, upper back, shoulders, head position, breathing, etc and linking the techniques back together through practice, we develop incredible technique and skills that transfer into huge performance gains and supports tissue and joint health.
With my coaching staff, we refer to it as T/P: Teach and Practice. Every workout, we have a teach and practice lesson. We want our lesson to do a few things:
Take less than 2 minutes to teach the class.
Involve something specific to the exercises or workout they are about to do.
Transcend the piece of the exercise and transfer to the other exercises and/or real world situations.
Can be focused on while warming up.
There are some more example videos below, but I’ll stick with the balance of the feet in the kettlebell swing example.
Does it take less than 2 minutes to teach the class? Yes. We can even keep the class active as they are listening to the short description as they can stand and feel their feet and easily move into a jumping position and jump feeling their feet.
Does the lesson involve something specific to the exercises or workout they are about to do? Yes, if there are kettlebell swings in the workout. If there is not kettlebell swings, we could still use the kettlebell swing to focus on feet, but ideally afterwards, we would need to apply that lesson into the specific exercises in the workout. For example, if we were going to do cleans, we may kettlebell swing to simply the exercise to help us focus on feeling our feet. Once we can feel it, then we could transfer it to the exercise we are doing that day.
Does the lesson transcend the piece of the exercise and transfer to the other exercises and/or real world situations? Yes. The T/P lessons should always refer back to the MovementLink foundations: posture, the squat, the push-up, and the jump and stem from there. This same jumping foot lesson could also be used with a workout that includes box jumps, cleans, snatches. We could pay attention to the balance on the feet in squats, jerks, presses, lunges, literally anything. The power of MovementLink shows that these movement patterns are everywhere. In the kettlebell swing video, I tend to roll too far on the outsides of my feet. Some people are too much on their toes, their heels, or the inside of their feet. Regardless, if we tend to do it in the kettlebell swing, because our movement patterns are so related, we will tend to do it in everything else too. I benefit from being reminded to focus on my feet regardless of the exercise.
Can this be focused on while warming up. Yes.
There are tons more Technique Layering videos on each individual page of the exercise guides.