Hey guys, welcome to today's episode of the live train perform podcast. I'm your host, Sean Cobra and during today's episode I'm going through my five minute fitness tips which I'll do every two weeks on thursday. So last week I spoke about intent and the difference between training and exercising in today's episode, I'm going to be speaking about how to get the most out of your training session by structuring a specific warm up to set you up for success. Now when it comes to the warm up, a lot of people just go through the motions and they don't really pay any attention to how they're moving, where they're holding tension, what their recruitment patterns are, if there's any dysfunction or any imbalances or anything like that. Now a protocol that I like to use is ramp up and ramp stands for Reyes activate Mobilize and potentially eight with the R. We're looking to raise the heart rate, the respiratory rate, the core temperature, blood flow to working muscles as well as viscous fluid to specific joints when it comes to activate.

I'm looking at firing up specific muscles that I'm going to be working within that training session and this might include things like stability based work or some bodybuilding style work where we're focusing on mind muscle connection. Now, what I'm looking for here is creating a strong contraction and a strong connection to the specific muscles that I want to work. I want to isolate certain muscles and get them fired up before I then integrate them into a specific movement or a compound based movement. An example of this is if I've got a strength based session where I'm focusing on building strength through my posterior chain and I'm choosing a dead lift as an example. Then within my warm up I'm going to be firing up all of my hip stabilizers and I'm going to be doing um hip airplanes or something like that so I can get all of those stabilizers fired up through the three planes of movement, which I'll talk about in another episode. Once I've got my stabilizers fired up, then I want to start targeting my hip extensive as being my glutes and hamstrings.

So if I want to fire up my hamstrings for example, I might do some hamstring curls and I'm slowing the movement down, I'm creating that mind muscle connection and I'm squeezing those muscles in specific areas and specific joint angles, then I might go into some glute bridges where again where I'm hitting that top position, I'm tucking my tailbone under and I'm targeting the squeeze of the glutes. Now, once I've done those movements I'm going to go through some mobility based work. So for example, if I spend a lot of time sitting throughout the day, the muscles of my glutes are going to start switching off because our body adapts to what we do a lot of. So I want to fire those muscles up and then turn off or switch off, dampen the signal to the opposing muscles being my hip flexes again. if you spend a lot of time sitting throughout the day then your hip flexes will become short and tight and that's going to limit your ability to fire your hip extensive is so again, dead lift, posterior chain focused targeting glutes and hamstrings.

If you want to get the most out of that then I need to turn off my hip flexes. So then I'm going to do some mobility based work where I might do some soft tissue work, might be foam rolling, it might be some stretching. Um either static or dynamic depending on how tired I am. Um And if I'm holding any tension in those areas then I'm going to do um some mobility and some activation for my back and my shoulders. All right, so what I'm looking at here is getting my shoulders in a good position to be able to support the weight that I'm gonna be bearing with my upper body. Okay. My lower body does the majority of the work with the dead lift, but my upper body also needs to be in a strong stable position so that I can produce as much force as I can with my hip extensions, glutes and hamstrings. Then I'm going through my potentially eight work which is basically practicing my movements. So some potential Haitian work might be some build upsets or some ramp upsets for my dead lift. Another potential Haitian drill or skill that I use is going through some jumps, some sprints or some throws.

Now for me finishing my warm up with some jump sprints or throws is an excellent way of prime in my central nervous system so I can send a strong signal to those muscles that I'm targeting. Alright, so again ramp raise the heart rate, core temperature, respiratory rate, blood flow to working muscles and viscous fluid. Two joints a activate for the prime movers that I'm trying to target as well as the stabilizers along with the synergistic muscles that are aiding in that movement. That prime movement. Then I'm looking at mobility work essentially allowing my joint to go through a decent range and get into a good position so that my prime movers can do their job and then I'm going to potentially eight jump sprint throw build up to practicing the movement. That is the main course for the day. So think about your ramp as your entree, this is what setting you up for your main course which is typically going to be your strength, speed, power, endurance, energy system conditioning, et cetera.

That's it for me today guys, hopefully enjoyed today's episode. Join me next week where I'll be going through some protocols for those modalities piece