Why (and How) to Warm Up Before Stretching
Why (and How) to Warm Up Before Stretching
Do you really need to warm up before stretching? Isn’t stretching usually a “warm up” for other workouts?
This really depends on the type of training you plan on working on. The goal of “warming up” is to prepare your body - your muscles, your joints, your cardiovascular and nervous systems, etc. - for your upcoming workout. For some hobbies, like martial arts or pole dancing, that often means including stretches as part of the warm up to be able to use that flexibility in their skill work.
But what about for flexibility training as a “work out?” This is where it really depends on the intensity of the stretching you’ll be doing.
Gentle stretching, like doing some light stretches when you wake up in the morning, or spending a couple of minutes on a stretch break at your desk, does not require a fancy dedicated warm up. If you’re just looking to do some light, feel-good stretches, don’t worry about warming up.
But if you’re looking to actually increase your flexibility during your stretching session, you really should take the time to warm up your body. Last week I talked about how our “warm” (post-warm up) flexibility is always deeper than our “cold” (non warmed up) flexibility, so if your goal is to train to deepen your flexibility long-term, or you plan on working on flexy skills like bridges, handstands, or splits, that means you’ll need to be warm enough to safely train (and strengthen!) that range of motion!
What Makes a Good Flexibility Warm Up?
A good warm up prepares your whole body (your muscles, your nerves, your connective tissue, your cardiovascular system, etc.) to address the skills you’ll be working on during your training. Below we’ll go into more detail on the 6(ish) types of movements you’ll likely want to include in your warm up, and the purposesthey serve:
1. Get Moving: Raise Your Temperature & Get Your Blood Pumping
One of the main goals of a warm up is to literally raise your body temperature (which can improve muscle elasticity). If you’ve ever taken a hot yoga class, you’ve probably noticed how much more flexible you can get when training in a heated room vs. a traditional (unheated) yoga practice. Or maybe you’ve noticed the opposite: how much more challenging it can feel to stretch when you’re cold. Thankfully you don’t have to rely on external heat sources to get bendy - just by doing ~5 minutes of aerobic-ish exercise our body will generate heat as a by-product of metabolism.
Another benefit of starting with some sort of movement exercise is that it gets your blood pumping, widening your blood vessels and helping make sure your muscles (which will be doing a lot of work during your training) are well supplied with oxygen.
Anything that increases your heart rate and breathing rate is typically what you want to aim for to kick off your warm up. It doesn’t need to be something particularly ass-kicking or sweat-drenching. Even a brisk walk is great! Examples of movements/activities that you could use as the “aerobic-ish” portion of your warm up include:
Doing 100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 100 squats, and a 10km run (this would be overkill)
Going for a walk
Going for a jog
Flowing through some sun salutations
Walking up and down the stairs a couple of times
Doing a combination of squats, jumping jacks, lunges, or other bodyweight movements
Going for a bike ride
Lifting weights (not technically “aerobic” but does raise our temperature and get the blood flowing!)
2. Lube Up Your Joints in Multiple ROMs (Ranges of Motion)
As we move our joints, they get lubricated with synovial fluid, which allows them to then move more easily. So get your joints moving in aaaaaall the ranges of motion they can move in (forwards and backwards, side to side, circles, etc.) to get them good and lubricated so they’ll move more easily in the rest of your practice. “Circling” movements are especially helpful because these typically hit our joints in all the possible planes they can move through. That could be movements like shoulder, elbow and/or wrist circles for your arms, chest circles in a tabletop position for your spine, head circles for your neck, knee/hip circles for your hips, and ankle circles for your feet.
For example, even if your flexibility session will be primarily focused on backbending (spinal extension), still include some frontbends, twists, and sidebends in your warm up to get all the articular surfaces between your vertebrae and ribs sliding and gliding as much as possible (plus, your upper back will thank you!).
3. Address Nerve Tension (If Applicable)
If you’ve got nerve tension, now’s the time to address it before you go into your deeper stretches (and potentially over-tension your nerves). Not sure if you have nerve tension? Check out this blog post for an overview of what nerve tension is, and how to test some of the common nerve-y culprits that can impact leg and shoulder flexibility.
Often just doing a couple of light nerve mobilizations (glides and/or tensioners) is enough to minimize nerve tension in the offending nerve(s) for the duration of your training session, but for students with quite high nerve tension, foam rolling or lacrosse ball-ing type work can also help reduce the symptoms of nerve tension. If you’re unfamiliar with how to manage your nerve tension, this is where working with a coach who can help tailor a modification approach to you can be super helpful!
4. [OPTIONAL] Roll It Out (Foam Rolling, Peanut-ing, etc.)
This is not something I personally include in my own warm up, but I do have students who swear that foam rolling or peanut-ing some of their tricky spots does help them loosen up before training. Especially for folks with nerve tension (see above), foam rolling can be a way to gently stretch our muscles (because massage is actually a form of passive stretching!) and work with our nervous system to potentially lessen the tone/tension in our muscles. Note: if you are foam rolling specifically to address nerve tension, you should do that before your nerve mobilizations.
5. Fire Up Your “Big Mover” and “Smaller Stabilizer” Muscles in the ROM You’ll Be Training
As I mentioned above, we do want to spend some time in our warmup moving our body in lots of different ranges of motion to get our joints good and lubed up, but we also want to spend extra time working on the muscles that support our joints in the range of motion we’ll be training them in (this is related to the rule of “specificity of training”). When thinking about what types of exercises to do for which muscles, it’s helpful to look at our muscles in two categories: the bigger “mover” muscles, the muscles responsible for big movements in a joint, and the smaller “stabilizer” muscles, the accessory muscles that help maintain optimal joint alignment to allow the big movers to work more efficiently. Now you’ll want to choose some movements that hit both your “big movers” and others that target the “smaller stabilizers” in the joint position you’ll be training.
For example, let’s say you want to work on your forward fold / pike flexibility. For that range of motion our hips are flexed (our thighs coming closer towards our torso) and legs are together. The main “big mover” muscles involved are the hamstrings on the back of the legs (the muscles being stretched!) and the hip flexors and quads on the front of the legs (the muscles being shortened, these are the muscles helping pull us into a deeper hamstring stretch:
So in our warm up, we’ll want to do some kind of movement to warm up the quads and hip flexors in their shortened position (ex. straight leg leg lifts), and warm up the hamstrings in their lengthened position (ex. deadlifts or good mornings), because that most closely mimics the position we’ll be focusing our training on:
It would be less helpful to warm up these muscles in a different range of motion. For example, leg extensions do strengthen the hamstrings, but they strengthen the hamstrings through a shortening range of motion (unlike the lengthened position we want to work them in in our forward folds. Likewise, something like quad lean backs are great strengtheners for the quads, but they primarily focus on working the quads through a lengthening range of motion, which is the opposite of what we need them to be doing in our hamstring stretches and forward fold work!
That doesn’t mean these are bad exercises! It just means that they are a less appropriate choice if your goal is to work on lengthening your hamstrings during that training session.
Next, if we think of the smaller “stabilizer” muscles, in our forward fold these are mostly our hip internal/external rotators (ex. adductor muscles, hip flexors, and various parts of the glutes). So warming up with some hip rotation exercises can be helpful. BUT we want to warm them up in the hip position that we’ll be training (in this example, hips flexed, legs near our midline). So that could look like pendulum leg swings with your knee in front of your hips or hip internal rotation knee block crunches. A less appropriate choice would be something like kneeling hip rotations because those are done in hip extension (kicking the leg backwards, not forwards), which isn’t the leg position we use in our forward folds.
Note: This does not mean you should necessarily only train your rotator muscles in one position. Especially for folks who have weak hip or shoulder rotators (maybe you’ve never done anything special to target them before!), it can sometimes be easier to work on strengthening them in different positions. For example, if you have tight shoulders and a weak rotator cuff, working on your shoulder external rotation when your arms are completely overhead is going to feel very hard. So you might have better luck starting with some rotator cuff warm ups with your arms at your sides or in front of your chest instead of starting with arms all the way overhead.
6. Add in Skill-Specific Drills (If Applicable)
Finally, if you plan on working on specific “skills” (ex. bridges or handstands on the floor, crazy split-y things on silks or on a pole), at some point in your training you should include some “skill specific” drills to make sure your body is prepared to do those more challenging movements. This may be part of your initial warm up, or if you’re doing more dedicated flexibility work, this will likely be after you’ve done some conditioning to get your body as flexible as needed for your particular skill.
For example, if you’re someone who struggles with the core engagement to not noodle too much in your handstands, doing a couple of hollow body holds on the floor, or working on some belly-to-the-wall handstands can be helpful to build up this technique before trying to dive into the harder full handstand skill.
Or maybe you’re someone who struggles with keeping their hips square when working on front splits. In addition to all the “regular” flexibility work you should be doing for your front splits, you might find it helpful to give yourself a “sensory bath” or do some half split or lunge square-to-unsquare slides before attempting your full-on front splits (pssst - I talk about all of those tips in this blog post: Building Visual and Physical Awareness for Square Splits).
Final Thoughts
Even though all that sounds like a lot, it doesn’t have to be! If you’re aiming for a quick, 20 minute training session, that might mean some of these “warm up” movements are actually part of your conditioning drills that you’re doing for your training. For shorter training sessions, I typically spend around 5 minutes doing some aerobic-y type drills where I’m starting to use the muscles I’ll be focusing on in my training (basically combining #1, #2and #5 above), do any nerve glides needed, and I’d have a good 15 minutes left for some deeper flexibility training work.
Even for folks who are working on more “advanced” skills that need a longer warm up to safely practice those skills (ex. bridges, forearm stands, chin stands, crazy pole tricks, etc.) - don’t forget to save some energy for your skillwork! Sometimes we get so focused on conditioning and stretching/strengthening to increase our flexibility, we’re too tired to then work on using that flexibility in our skills. This is something that’ll likely take some trial and error in your own training to learn how much warming up for each body part you really need for that particular skill. Eventually as you get more flexible and stronger, you’ll need less time to warm up, and you can spend more time on your skillwork, or be able to progress to more challenging conditioning exercises.
