Are You Really Still Doing Stretches From 50 Years Ago?
To watch the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/acRwHI7CLus
Hey there coaches and athletes Michael Hughes here functional movement specialist and CEO of Gymnazo Edu, if you’re going to be doing a warm up, which you should absolutely be doing before every single session, you have to warm up for what you’re going to be doing, I want to challenge you to take your work beyond the basic stretches that look like this. Because these exercises are not necessarily helping you maximize to get the most out of your time and your warmup. So I’m gonna get into the nuts and bolts of a functional three dimensional warmup that I use with every single client in a small group setting. And you can take this exact warmup and use it in your sessions as well. But first, make sure to subscribe to our channel to continue to get the movement and coach related content that will take your training beyond the typical single plane exercise that everyone’s been doing for decades, and start moving it into the third dimension. i Before we get started, I really want to encourage you to do this warm up with me. So let’s stand up, let’s move around a little bit, do a body scan, let’s see, if we’re noticing anything a little bit different from a mobility and stability standpoint of our body in motion. Now, I’m going to take you through this form of exactly how I take my clients through it. But I’m going to be describing in the details of what you should be kind of doing and feeling and moving through. So a good opportunity for you to post out your comments after this video is done. And let me know how you feel. Now for those trackers out there, there’s gonna be several different stages, kind of starting from a mobility standpoint, and we’re going to kind of journey through a stability ending. And so there’s gonna be a little piece in there for a cardiovascular focused warmup workout, if that’s going to be the choice that you would want to give your athlete or your client, because it’s going to be that type of workout. And the first thing we’re going to do is a lunge reach matrix, the word matrix is going to be intended for a three dimensional sequence flow that describes how we’re going to be going through through things. This one’s going to be focused on lunging, and the back foot or the non lunging leg, the non lunging leg is going to be the focus of this mobility progression, we’re gonna do five reps each side, and we’re going to always going to alternate right and left legs. So without further ado, let’s get moving. forward lunge, both hands, post your overhead reach, come back home, switch legs, just feel it out first. Now what I’m doing, as I’m basically taking my anterior chain, all the muscles, all the connective tissue in the anterior side of my body, and I’m saying go through extension. I know my ankle is not going through extension, but everything else is knee joint, hip joint, lumbar, spine, thoracic spine, cervical spine. And even though my shoulders are not called that, it’s simply just taking and bending it backwards as it opens up. Now, what I like about this, even if you take a peek at my back foot, there’s a little bit of heel out a little bit of toe in truly trying to maximize that push off feel like it would be when I’d be running. Now, as I’ve mobilized the anterior part of my body, we realize that there’s many more sides to go for, especially if you understand that there’s a sagittal, frontal and transverse plane aspect to every single joint, and therefore connective tissue and muscles and all that included in our body. So let’s go post your now. Now, this is a lunge sequence. So you may see this next move and be like, wait a minute, is that really a lunge? Well, let’s, let’s talk about it. I’m going to do a poster your step squat into it. But my squats not going to be so much downward, it’s going to be more backwards and more horizontal as I swing my arms back and through. Now we differentiate a squat from a lunge. By this term, are you going in motion, vertical, or are you going more horizontal. Now because a squat is a vertical displacement and a lunge as a horizontal displacement, we would call this a lunge because we’re actually going more horizontal than we are going vertically up and down. Regardless has changed my viewpoint, you can see how I’m taking everything through flexion. Now, the big focus from the lower body is going to be a calves, hamstrings, glutes, and my upper body, the erector spine and even the anterior part of my shoulder. I’m mobilizing everything in the posterior chain of my body. So let’s get through this. One more time, each basically feeling really good, as now I can move through my posterior chain a lot better. Now sagittal planes done moving into the funnel plan. Now I’m gonna take my right foot into a right lateral lunge. Both hands gonna be bending off to the opposite side. So as we go through a lunge pattern, we’re going and feeling the adductor and the same side lateral core, going through a tension build up. Basically eccentric loading or lengthening of the connective tissue. The goal is to stay tall and get a nice C shape. For crescent shape through our entire body. From there, we went to the opposite side lateral, right foot went right, but now right foot goes left. As I lunge into that step with a horizontal displacement meant of motion, my hands bend, go the opposite direction, lunge Bendigo, the opposite direction. Now focusing on much more of the lateral hip, from glute medius TfL, it bend down to the side of the calf. And of course, still through my lateral core feels awesome. Especially if you don’t spend much time with your arms overhead. Especially if you don’t spend much time through your lateral core, back and forth, still putting weight in my lunging foot as I transfer my weight and slide it to the side, from their frontal planes taken care of now moving into the transverse plane. Now, following your your kind of Compass zones here, I’ve went forward and backwards, left to right, now need to spin, I’m going to step into 135 degrees of open rotation, leaving my stance left foot behind. As I open up, lunge into it, swing my arms around the corner, come back home, lunge into it 135 degrees open, spin my hips around, come back home, I’m focusing on external hip rotation, focusing on relative pronation, focusing on transverse plane thoracic spine, cervical spine rotation, as I get through, essentially this diagonal fascial sling on the front part of my body that starts from the inside of my ankle runs the inside thigh across my core into my upside chest and even through my up side shoulder. Because our fascia doesn’t just run in straight lines, it runs in straight lines and runs in diagonal lines and also runs in spiral lines. And we want to take care of those well through our warmup because we want to prepare ourselves for everything that can be in front of us in our right foot went to a right rotation focusing in external rotation at the hip. Now we’re gonna take our right foot to go upside rotation of 45 degree angle to focus on internal rotation and relative supination at our foot, so cross over lunch, get into it, spin around the corner, come back call me song, my bass foot did not move. It stayed put, as I’m taking my body through that, again, that fascial spiral pattern as I move through all the joints, all the tissue and start to basically make my body say Alright, I’m ready to go forward, I’m ready to go back. I’m ready to go side side and I’m ready to spin open and spin closed off from a stance, leg, mobility and throat and thoracic spine shoulder range of motion in all three planes of motion. The next piece that we have is going to be a stability portion of what we did. So I highly recommend you grab onto a lightweight, grab onto a nine pound Viper. And we’re going to go through just a few of our lunges or the more common lunges. So our first one is going to be anterior lunge hold as I take my hands through a loaded forward, backwards overhead. right lateral, left lateral, right rotation, left rotation, swing, I’m gonna do the same thing on my right side and in the frontal plane lunge, reaching forward, reaching backwards here my body is responding to where the load is going. It’s countering its position. As it goes to open rotation do the same thing forward, backwards, side, side, spin
and spin. And I’m taking my body to relative extremes of the light load through dynamic motion. So we’re gonna start to perceptively base my nervous system say okay, I see what’s what’s going on here. I see what the body’s asking me to do and how we need to start preparing, waking up and making the system capable, able, alive to say, Okay, let’s start managing this. Let’s make sure that the hip joints are ready thoracic spine joints are ready, ankle joints are ready. And as I’ve moved through that pattern, I’m literally taking all 66 vital joints in my body and moving them through three different planes of motion that they can authentically do while loaded from the top of gravity and compressed from essentially ground reaction forces from the feet. It’s a pretty sweet setup and pretty efficient as you want to think about just those two progressions that I went through, but there’s more to a warmth than just lunging, or horizontal displacement. There’s also a vertical displacement now because there’s a lot of lower body focused things in a workout, we’re gonna say go, how do I prepare my my legs for a lot of squatting, we’re going to put our feet into essentially six different foot patterns right foot in front of left, and we’re going to squat down five times, one, two. And as we go through this, you got to think my back leg is in more flexion, as my front leg is in more relative extension, but it’s still flexion. But it says less flexion. Because I want prepare my body to have a staggered stance, let’s do the same thing on the opposite side, switch. So again, now I’m getting much more flexion, relative to my opposite side. And this hip, in allows me to kind of get a sense on what’s going on, is there anything or any alarm bells that are going off? That should kind of warn me like, wait a minute, I don’t think that right ankle can manage that amount of dorsiflexion, or that knee amount of flexion, this hip amount of flexion. So it can kind of tell me, is this one heel popping up off the ground? Or this back heel staying down? And what does that tell me? Or more importantly, you as a coach, what does it tell you tell you about your athlete and how you can help them prepare better for their workout. So that was the Sajith plan. What about the funnel plan, we’re gonna go wide feet, much more abductor focused, definitely taking the adductors through more range of motion than any other muscle relative to a normal squat. From there, we’re gonna take it into a narrower stance, so putting more focus on the lateral hips. Now, again, I’m doing this with no weight on my body, it is completely up to our clients. And therefore up to you. If you want to load your body with some motion, or loaded body through this motion pattern to provide much more of a realistic feel. If you’re that was going to be your, your particular workout. Now we’re gonna go through external rotation of our hips, driving into it, preparing the hip joints, to manage a little bit more external rotation. Again, much more abductor focus loading, much more, much less scuze. Me post your hip or glute loading. But now we go toe in. Now we’re going to get much more posterior hip loading, much more lateral hamstring loading as we go through this. Now, you might say, Gosh, Mikoto, and that seems a little bit dangerous. Well, I asked the question to you, and you can post this is why is it dangerous? What makes it dangerous? From there, let’s get into a nice discussion about understanding the mechanics of what I’m actually doing. And what would make this quote unquote, safe, dangerous or not, let’s get tuned to a little chatter. Because I bet we’re going to learn a lot from what we know and what we maybe don’t realize, we do know about how the human body functions. Now, if you’re gonna do a little bit of a cardiovascular feel, we do some locomotion drills, because if you’re going to be running, if you’re going to be going through gait cycles, if you’re going through any three cone drill, spiller drills, we want to keep these muscles alive, but much more reactive, much more kind of bouncy in a sense, versus our relative slower warmup that we’ve been doing so far. So I’m gonna be doing some running, some shuffling, and some skipping in all three planes of motion, relative to a linear path. So check this out, I’m going to be starting here. And we use this in a in a 15 foot turf section, you can use as much or little room as you want. I’m going to be using this little space here to show you what we’re going to be doing. So first, we’re going to be doing a forward and backwards run and I’ll go across the screen twice. So again, I’m going to be going a little bit choppier, because I don’t have as much room. But if you have a full facility, you can strike it out much, much more. still afford Run little backwards a little forward, a little backwards around from
there we go to sideways or Funnel Plan run crossing in front with my trail foot in front, crossing in front of my trail foot crossing in front of the trail foot, crossing front my trail foot again, same running patterns still having one foot in the air, and one foot on the ground at any given time. But I’m changing my angulation and therefore the muscles approach receptors and even even the sense of my own body awareness through through space. Now because we’re gonna do in a linear fashion, we’re going to be doing a base, a slalom run. So if cut to the right, cut to the left, cut to the right, cut to the right and left as I go backwards to prepare, basically that change of direction as I would in any sort of drill that I would encounter or any sort of activity on the field that I would encounter. So we want to prepare for that change. Prepare for that change and do it in a systematic form. That’s running check. Now shuffling now the rule of the shuffle is my feet cannot cross The path, the plane rather of the other foot. So I’ve put one foot in front, and the answer shuffle would be one foot in front, left foot or back foot matches, boom, boom, boom, boom, backwards, the same thing back, back, back, forward, forward, forward, back, back, back. I’ll be an anterior, post your shuffle, right foot leading, left foot in front, boom, same thing, left foot leading, right for leading on the way back, left foot leading, right foot leading on the way back. Now we’ll go to a Funnel Plan shuffle, which is probably the shuffle that you will have done hundreds of times, if you’ve gone through any sort of traditional sport practice, side to side, side to side. There are more complicated shuffles that we can do. But we don’t do that for small group warmup, then we go to into our rotational shuffle again, we do this from a linear perspective, versus a true rotational pattern. So we go right foot leading, cut, spin, left foot leading, cut spin, right foot leading who did the same thing going backwards. Again, not a true transverse plane shuffle. But again, from a systematic, systematic, warm up procedure of having multiple clients do this at once. It allows our facility to be used most efficiently and still get that rotational pivot pattern, change of direction built into a shuffle. Last one we go through is a skip pattern. And this is a B, skip or bilateral skip all the patterns again, in three dimensions. So forward, or anterior, pumping through, we’re not just pumping the arms, we’re also rotating through the trunk as well, driving our shoulders forward, as well as our hands and elbows sagittal plane check, funnel plane, trail foot crossover. trail foot crosses over again, a skip is simply a step two, hop, step two hop step two, go the opposite way. If you’ve never done this, sure, you’re smiling pretty big, right about now. What about the transverse plane? What about changing direction as we go through a skip, to hop backwards,
cut direction, cut direction,cut direction, one more time.Cut direction, cut direction, cut direction.
Now I’m not really too concerned, if you always cut off your outside leg or your inside leg, yes, there’s more efficient ways to do that. But when you’re running and locomoting, you don’t always have the choice of choosing to be often the cutting off your outside leg to change directions. Sometimes you have to cut off your inside leg to change direction. So we want to train that authentically as we move through patterns. Now, last piece of our warmup is core. Now you could argue everything we’ve done is core. I would argue that’s true too. But we’re gonna be focusing on the core. Now we do core from an upright standpoint, why because that’s how our core is used 99% of the time seated or upright. So therefore in our workout. Yes, we do do supine and prone drills. And we do have a warmup specifically for those particular pieces. But for general Small Group Training, this is what we do grab on to any tool, we’re gonna go through what we call a initial, medium and end range of motion Swing pattern, we have four different swing patterns, we’re going to go across the body, and diagonal, the diagonal, and then vertical. So we’re gonna do about three each, three small, three, medium, three large looks like this. Nice and small, nice and kind of tight, quick for those initial range of motion patterns. A little bit bigger, not pivoting from my feet yet, but I’m allowing more hip and foot pattern. That here’s the full thing. For for pivot, full pivot for pivot, back and forth, getting the body full of going through a horizontal level by diagonal, left pocket right shoulder nice and tight. Nice and tight, really keen credit stability through my centerline and give you hear in my voice. What he’s fighting to even keep air passing through a little bit bigger, a little bit easier. From the lung from a from a core tension level. And the noun just letting it flow, letting it flow, letting it flow, letting it flow, letting it flow. Same direction, switch sides, right but this time, no joke. That little sweat going on, which is perfect. Just perfect. Not only have I gone through joint mobility and stability as I go bigger, go full big. I’m actually getting my body temperature up, which is traditionally what a warm has been done for We got to take much more beyond the just a core temperature rise when it go through a joint and range of motion, quote unquote warm up. Nice job. Last one, Senator very much like a kettlebell swing, if you want to think about it that way, nice and tight. Hips are dominant, core, dominant, fast, explain dominant, the rest is falling long for a free ride with a bigger kind of head. Height and a sense. I’m going all the way back. Here we go. Full extension. full flexion full extension, full flexion Three, two, and our one right there. All right. That’s it. Again, leave a comment below. Let me know how you’re feeling and how you’re feeling after that warmup. If you’re feeling good, make sure to click the thumbs up button. And like this video, and don’t forget to Subscribe and Support the channel. So we can keep on making content like this. If you have any questions, that why we did something in a deeper dive, leave a comment I read every single one. And I want to make sure that you understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and why we chose this system of different pieces to build into a cohesive group warmup. Thanks for watching. Keep on moving. And I’ll talk to you guys soon. Cheers.
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