Pre-Run Exercise Guide
Pre-Run Exercise Guide
How to get your body ready for a better workout
What is a DYNAMIC warm up??
DYNAMIC means MOVING, so your warm up should not consist of static (standing still) stretching (i.e. sitting and touching your toes, standing quad stretch, standing calf stretch). There are a couple of reasons for this.
1) Cold muscle’s don’t stretch well, and you have a higher chance of injuring yourself when you do stretch them. Although it feels good when your muscles are tights, they are going to loosen up for your WAY more after you have done 5 - 10 minutes of easy running
2) Before a run is NOT the time to try and increase your flexibility! The purpose of your “warm-up” is to get blood (which carries oxygen) flowing to your muscles, which will allow you to work at a higher intensity. Prior to this “warm-up”, there is very little blood flowing to your muscles (and therefore very little oxygen), which is why the first 5-10 minutes of your “warm-up” generally don’t feel great. However, once you increase your heart rate (i.e. blood flow), your body has more oxygen available to produce energy.
So when would you do a dynamic warm up?
Before any race OR hard workout! It may seem silly to run in PREPARATION to run some more, but when you are doing interval training (for example), it is important that you working HARD in those interval sets. If you are not properly warmed up, you might take your first one a tittle slower which means you just wasted that interval (lower quality intervals don’t provide the same metabolic benefits as, but still fatigue you for following sets ).
What does a dynamic warm up look like?
I encourage all of my athletes to maintain a little bit of a skip doing all exercises, and be sure not to hold any one pose for more than a few seconds. Once again, later in the evening or midday at work is a GREAT time to work on mobility (like this demo exercise for your HIPS), or static stretching if you are working on a specific limitation, but keep the static stretching out of the dynamic warm-up.
Below are a few examples of some great dynamic stretches to incorporate into your routine! Ideally, you want to run 10-15 minutes very easy before starting the dynamic exercise portion of your warm-up. If possible, it is ideal to complete the following sequence with bare or sock feet before popping your shoes back on for your main running set.
Arm Circles
While doing a light skip, do full arm circles coupled with light twists. The key here is not to WALK while doing this, as you want to slowly be increasing your blood flow throughout your body.
Hip Circles
After completing one full rotation on your right side, jog a few steps forward, stop and do one complete rotation on the other side.
Walking Quad Balance
Start with a 5- sec standing quad stretch, then “tip forward” and extend opposite hand in front of you. Think about pulling the hip of the leg that is in the air “down” to make your hips level when “tipping” over. Make sure to add in little 3-4 step “jogs” between each stretch.
Lunge twist
Start with a lunge, then drop down to twist TOWARDS your bent knee. Shift your weight to the front foot to lift your back leg off the ground to return to standing. To add more of a HAMSTRING component - check out this video DEMO
Pre- Run Activation Exercises
After doing the dynamic stretches above, add some specific “strength based” exercises to increase blood blow and activations of the key muscles you want to use when you run. Repeat the following circuit 2x:
