Working out has so many benefits, it improves your mood, increases your metabolism which helps burn more fat and build muscle, keeps you fit, improves your health and many more. In order to exercise and do it regularly, you have to perform the exercises with proper form and to warm up.Let’s discuss the warming up part, which is often neglected or often confused. For more, you can visit Healthy Joints
Why warm up
Warming up is really crucial for your muscles, ligaments, tendons and joints. It prepares them for the upcoming training session and thus reduces the injury risk. Warming up activates the muscles and lubricates the joints, by taking about 5-10 minutes to do it, can really decrease the chance of injuries during workout.
How to warm up
Well probably you have already though about a way to warm up – the most famous one is to do few arm circles and leg circling movements and that’s about it. Well we want to advise you to do a little bit more than that. The above technique is good but not great. To really warm up your joints you have to use a little bit of weight, usually 30-60% of the normal weight that you are going to use, this way you are creating far more useful motion which really warms up the ligaments, muscles, tendons and joints. Doing first 1 or 2 sets with lower weight is a great way to warm up.
How not to warm up
Do not put your usual weight and do few faster sets, this way you are actually increasing the chances of injuries. The warming up should be done slowly and in controlled manner. Quick uncontrolled movements are not good for your joints, ligaments, tendons or muscles.
Do not warm up with just 1 set, if you only warm up with the first set it might warm up the muscles that you are going to use for that exercise but in the next one a little bit different muscles might be used which are not properly warmed up. So we would recommend you to warm up for 1 or 2 first sets of the 1 or 2 first exercises, to increase its benefits.
Take few minutes before your workout session and use them to properly warm up, it is a great idea to do it regularly and it is not time consuming or energy depleting process. Doing first few sets with lowered weight is not going to affect your progress or the workload that you usual do. If however you feel tired, then you probably warm up with too much weight or too many sets.
