This morning, I was giving a lecture to a group of young college students on how to work out.
I started by talking about warm-ups. I asked them:
“Why do you need to warm-up?”
I got answers like…
“Not to get injured”
“To make your body warm”
and many of the variations of both answers above.
These are the obvious.
Basically, there are 2 reasons why you want to warm-up:
1) Prevent injuries (which everybody knows)
2) Improve performance (which is common sense but nobody thinks of
when asked).
Get your body warm isn’t why you want to warm-up but it’s one of three things you want to accomplish in a warm-up to prevent injuries and improve perfomrance.
These three things are:
1) Get your body warm
2) Increase range of motion of muscles around the joints
These two are usually well-known…
3) Turn on the nervous system.
Which is the one that we tend not to be aware. You see, to generate strength, speed, and power, you need your nervous system to be sharp, alert and ready to react quickly.
As mentionned yesterday, static stretching DOES NOT turn on the nervous system.
IT TURNS IT OFF!!!
THat’s why using static stretching as a mean to warm-up isn’t appropriate.
It DECREASES performance.
You need a warm-up that will address all three things mentionned above – usually a dynamic warm-up.
I have had so many requests over the last few years for a cutting-edge softball-specific dynamic warm-up
protocol that I FINALLY went to work and created one.
It’s ready and it will be released early next week. Stay tuned to get your own copy of my system that includes 2-DVDs!
In the mean time, warm-up properly and keep the static stretching for after your games, practices, or workouts.