Warming Up Makes Your Workout Twice As Effective!
Friday, June 11th, 2010In their quest to build muscle fast and just hit the weights, most body builders over look one of the most important aspects of building muscle. Warming up.
Warming up makes your workouts more effective thereby maximizing muscle growth. Chief among the benefits of warming up are:
i) You will be able to lift much more weight. If you recall from an earlier post, the key to building muscle is progressively lifting more weights so this is pretty important.
2. Reduces the risk of injury to your joints and muscles.
I recommend structuring your warm up into 3 short parts. Start with a light cardio routine. Five minutes on the stairmaster, treadmill or cylcle machine should be sufficient. Make sure you do not exert yourself during this phase. You will want to conserve all your energy for the actual workout. Too often I see people doing cardio vigorously, dripping in sweat and then proceeding to workout. When you do this you have little left to give during the weight lifting phase.
Doing light cardio exercise causes synovial to be secreted. Synovial is a fluid which lubricates the joints and reduces friction whenever there is movement. A good amount of this makes your workout ‘frictionless’ if I may use that term!
The next part of the warm up is stretching. Stretching increases your flexibility and also further prepares the muscles for the difficult task of weight lifting ahead. It is difficult to explain the various stretches in words, so see the link at the bottom of the article for how to stretch. Do a complete body stretch before the actual workout and also try to stretch in between sets. Good stretching can double the effectiveness of your workout.
Once you complete the stretches use light weights to exercise your target muscle groups. This is the third and final part of the warm up phase. It is not necessary to do this for all the muscles-just the ones you will be hitting that day. If you’ll be doing chest and back, do chest and back exercise with extremely low poundages and several repetitions.
In summary stretch the whole body and lightly exercise the muscle group of the day using compound exercises with low weights. Also try and keep focus on what you are doing the whole time. Avoid chit chatting and other distractions that lengthen you time in the gym. The mission is to always spend fifteen minutes warming up and an hour on the workout. Any more than that is counter productive.
Since cardio is the least mind intensive part of the workout, use the time spent on cardio to visualize the results you want and the intensity you will bring to bear when lifting the weights. The mental part of bodybuilding is just as important and should not be neglected.
To recap what I just said in one sentence: You ABSOLUTELY MUST warm up before working out if you want to maximize muscle gain and avoid injuries.
Don is a fitness enthusiast and writer. Get the Real Results Men’s Workout Also Learn how to get Men’s Workout Abs