RUNNING WARMUP

Here is the complete Running Warmup for you to follow. Give it a shot the next time you are headed out for a run. We have taken the time to put together an intelligent warmup that incorporates the various components necessary to promote an efficient stride. Here is the extra descriptions for each move along with the number of repetitions of each.

Standing 3 Position Arm Raises – 10x each position (Stand with feet at hip width, arms relaxed by sides. Lift arms to the 12 o’clock position (arms straight overhead pointing behind). Repeat arm lifts at 10 and 2 (arms halfway between overhead and straight out from sides) and finally at 9 and 3 (arms straight out from sides.)

Windmills – 10x each direction (Stand with your feet out much wider than the hips and your feet pointing forward. Now place you arms straight out to the side at shoulder height. From this position bend and twist from the waist as you bring your right hand down to your left foot. Stand all the way back up, then go to the other side)

Standing Cats & Dogs – 10x (Stand feet hip width apart, hands on thighs, and knees bent. Arch back up like a scared cat and push chin to chest, then lower back toward floor and raise head up. Repeat alternating between the two positions.)

Standing Quad – 30 seconds each leg (Stand in front of a chair on left leg, place left hand on chair for support; bend right knee and pull heel toward glutes, reach down with right hand and hold right foot. Keeping knees even and hips square to chair, squeeze right glute and slightly press hip forward and hold. Switch legs and repeat.)

Runner’s Stretch – 30 seconds each side (On hands and knees, place left heel directly in front of right knee, stand up keeping your feet in place and straightening both legs. Keep both thighs tight and bend over front foot. Rest hands on floor or chair and hold.)

Standing Hip Flexor Stretch – 30 seconds each side (Stand with hands on hips, right leg out in front of you and left leg behind. Bend both knees allowing your left knee to drop toward the floor. Hold this position with left leg a few inches above the ground and then without raising your hips, try to straighten your left leg. Switch legs and repeat.)

Rotational Stork Walk – 20 steps (stand with hands behind head. Pull left knee outside and up to 90 degrees and bring knee back to shoulder width while keeping foot under knee (one fluid motion). Step forward while lowering left foot toward the floor and repeat with right leg.)

Lateral Lunge Walk – 15 steps each way (Stand with feet under hips and hands behind head, bend right knee and take a big step to the side with your right leg. Standup by straightening right leg and bringing left leg underneath hips. Repeat then switch directions.)

Full Squats – 10x (Stand with feet directly under hips and toes pointing forward. Place hands behind head and pinch shoulder blades together. Without letting heels come off the floor, squat down as far as is comfortable and back up; repeat.)

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When you are stretching, you need to be sure that you are contracting the antagonist muscles to the ones you are lengthening in order to make the stretch functional and fully lengthen out the fibers of the muscle you’re attempting to stretch. The antagonist is the muscle that does to opposite function of a certain muscle.

A good example of this is the standing quad stretch. The most overlooked component of most stretches, and especially ones like this, is the contraction of the antagonist. In the standing quad, the muscles of the front of your leg, the quadriceps, are being lengthened. In order to ensure you are really getting the full benefits of the stretch, you must make sure you are flexing the glutes and hamstrings of that leg in order to push the hip forward.

Doing this makes it a more functional move, and helps develop greater range of motion in your joints as well as flexibility in your muscles.

Loren Sheets

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FULL SQUATS

Full Squats or Free Squats are one of the more common exercises we use at the end of warm-ups and cool-downs to introduce proper loading into the hips, knees, and ankles. With the progression of the warm-up exercises leading into this one all designed to properly align the skeletal system, this moves help to reinforce this anatomically correct position.

Next week we will be putting together the complete video warm-up with each of the exercises along with the number of repetitions or time to do each one.

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Standing Hip Flexor Stretch

You can never do enough lengthening of the hip flexors with the amount of siting we are forced to do as a part of our jobs. This is the main reason why we decided to add an additional stretch for the hip flexors as a part of the running warm-up. This is a great stretch that can even be done throughout the day to help break the tightness that we suffer from as we sit.

Try adding this in a few times an hour to help keep your hips in better alignment for your running workouts.

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This week I have been doing quite a bit of stretching. I mostly wanted to combat the tightness that I was beginning to feel as a result of sitting in classes and studying at my desk, along with the lifting I have been doing as a part of training. It feels good to be able to bend and twist now without significant tightness in my lower back, hamstrings, hip flexors, etc. As I was thinking of a good tip for the week, I remembered how we always used to stretch in PE classes and for team warm-ups several years back. Typically, you hold a stretch and count to 10 or so. This week though, and from now on, you should try holding each stretch you do for at least thirty seconds or even up to a minute. Ten seconds is really not long enough to significantly and adequately lengthen out the muscle fibers and tendons.

In your body, there are tiny sensors called receptors. They are a form of neuron, which carries electrical impulses to and from the brain. In the skin, there are several types of receptors that pick up the sensations of temperature and pressure. In the eyes, these receptors detect light. All these receptors do is carry the information to the brain when stimulated. The brain then reacts and sends signals through neurons to your muscles. This is how you can react to stimulus. Sometimes these reactions are voluntary, and other times they are involuntary. In the muscle itself, there are tiny receptors called mechanoreceptors. A particular type of mechanoreceptors called the stretch receptor detects the amount of tension on a muscle. They send this information to the brain, and it reacts. So, when you stretch a muscle, your brain knows it is being stretched. Stretch receptors are partly responsible for maintaining balance, or proprioception. When you walk on uneven ground, your brain can sense the stretching of the muscles and appropriately react to maintain equilibrium.

In regards to stretching, your body has an involuntary process called the stretch reflex. When a muscle is stretched to a certain point, the brain tells it to contract in order to protect it from being stretched to the point of tearing. Well, when you are doing a stretch, the muscle will naturally resist, and become tight. After a period of time, however, the information from the stretch receptors to the brain begins to lose its intensity as the brain tunes it out. It is similar to how you can tune out random noise over time, as your brain loses focus on it. When this happens with the stretch receptors, the stretch reflex weakens and allows the muscle to stretch a little farther. This will increase the muscles overall flexibility. This cannot be achieved in only 10 seconds of stretching, however. It may take thirty seconds to a minute for the stretch reflex to wear off so the muscle can be fully lengthened. This is why you should take the extra time and hold you stretches longer from now on.

Loren Sheets

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Runners Stretch

Runner’s Stretch is an excellent move for lengthening out the hamstrings. Like the previous week’s exercise to lengthen the hip flexors, keeping the hamstrings flexible is an important part of becoming a more efficient runner. Take the time throughout the day to stretch out your hamstrings if you spend quite a bit of time in a seated position. The impact you can make in a few short days will make a difference in your running.

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Welcome Back for the 7th installment of our Fitness Tip of the Week Program. Here’s another tip that I would recommend you make a habit of during your warm-ups. During your warm-up, keep your shoes off. If you are going for a run, definitely check out some of our warm-up posts. They provide the necessary stimulus to the muscular system to make sure that your body will be moving in an efficient manner. But still, the muscles of the feet need the proper stimulus so they can do their job of holding the foot in its proper alignment so that the impact of running will be dispersed evenly and efficiently.

Most people tend to buy shoes that “fit” their foot’s anatomical imbalances. There are shoes that are for high arch feet and low arch feet, overpronators, and so on. The foot itself, though, technically should not need a special shoe to have a neutral alignment. While these shoes can relieve foot pain by adding extra support, the body must compensate somewhere else for the change in demand on the foot from the shoe. This lead to pain in other areas of the body, such as knees and lower back.

What if you just made it a habit to spend time in your routines, specifically your warm-up, to give the muscles of the foot various stimulus? Remember Law Number Two: the body will actually change based on the stimulus it receives. This means the foot itself will also change and adapt because of the stimulus to the muscles of the feet. When these muscles are working the way they are supposed to because of adequate stimulus, the obvious outcome is a foot that is aligned to its natural anatomical position. Thus, the need for orthotics to compensate for feet that cant support themselves becomes obsolete. Obviously there may still be some anatomical abnormalities that may exist that may require some specific type of shoe but I feel this would be the exception, not the rule like it is these days.

Much, much more can be said concerning this topic, but I will leave you with that one simple tip, warm up barefoot. The cross-country and track teams at the high school I help coach for have adapted this principle, and I encourage you to give it a shot this week. We have also noticed it has begun to make a difference with the Soccer Teams that we are using this technique with. Girls that normally have some foot issues are not feeling their normal aches and pains.

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Loren is incredibly passionate about fitness and more importantly looking for the absolute best way to train the human body. He will be sharing tips with you that are items you can instantly apply to your current workout or lifestyle. We will use Tuesdays as the official Fitness tip of the Week Posts.

Hello everyone and welcome to train2move.com! My name is Loren Sheets and I have been a Train2move athlete for 4 years now, and I am excited to share some training information with all of you! This is the first post in a new series of weekly posts where I will briefly cover a training tip that you can use while going through your workout.
Being the first week, I figure I should start off by giving a great tip that you can use in your warm-ups. Remember, every good workout should begin with a proper warm-up to ensure that the body is moving in an efficient manner. At train2move, we believe there are a number of warm-up essentials. One of them is hip flexor range. Because we spend a lot of time sitting throughout the day, the hip flexor muscles can become tight from being held in a fixed position. Most people focus on stretching their hamstrings by doing a forward bend, but the hip flexors are often overlooked. In order to ensure our hips are moving properly during a workout, we must make sure those muscles have been sufficiently lengthened.

The next time you warm up for a workout, try including a Kneeling Hip Flexor stretch. This was actually our very first exercise of the week exercise choice. From a kneeling position, place one foot out in front of your body, then sink you weight into that leg while keeping your torso up. Don’t lean way out over the front leg; just press into the hip. Also, try to flex the glute of the leg that is behind; this will help stretch the hip flexor.

If you want to try a little more advanced version of this stretch, place your back foot up on a chair or against a wall. Just be sure that you can stay up tall and not hunched over. One last key is to be sure your front knee does not go past that foot. If it does, move the foot farther forward. Hold the stretch for at least a minute, then switch legs.
Try doing this stretch before you go work out. See if you notice increased flexibility in your hip flexors after several days. Next week I will have another warm-up tip for you. In the meantime, check out some older posts on warm-ups by clicking here!!

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Part of my progress so far definitely has to be credited to the warm-up and cool-down routines I have been doing before and after each of my runs. Preparing the body before a workout is something that is often short-changed, or worse, left out altogether. Just the other day I was looking through a college football off season training schedule and it had no stretching before the workout and only ten minutes of it afterwards. It even said “very important” next to the stretching, but then failed to give any instruction as to what stretches to do.

This is merely one example of how we, at Train2move, differ from the majority. As part of the Marathon Package we are constructing  specific warm-up and cool-down routines that will help put your body in a position to perform as efficiently as possible, as well as greatly reducing the chance of injury. In the meantime we posted a good running warm-up in our running efficiency training section of the blog. Check it out to see an example of one of our running warm-ups. Also make sure you visit the post on why a proper cool-down.

I can remember back before I trained with Scott and Trinity Sports and I almost never did any form of a warm-up. Now I understand why I had the pain symptoms that I did. I can’t even imagine trying to go through an intense workout without first doing some form of preparation. Simply put, the warm-up and the cool-down, which is designed to help neutralize any negatives from the workout, are extremely vital to the continued success regarding my own training and any athlete for that matter. 

This upcoming section of training will have five runs over the next ten days, including a long run in the 16-17 mile distance range. Thank you to those that commented on the first post, your words were a great encouragement. Again, if you are a runner or walker with a story, comment, or an update of your own we would love to hear from you!

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