A Winter Warm Up

The first 6 to 10 minutes of any workout should be dedicated to ramping up the body's readiness for high intensity work. Despite the name, the advisability of this has to do with more than just temperature.

Among its other values, warm ups are designed to reveal your current state of flexibility or any other range-of-motion issues that may have crept in since your last workout. Plus, biological programming makes us resistant to coming out of the resting state we are in whenever we are not being physically challenged. You may have noticed that the first 2 or so minutes of the warm up are typically the hardest. That is evidence of this resistance, but it soon passes and getting beyond that point is one of the most important reasons for engaging in a warm up.

Your highest priorities for the warm up period should be maintaining as much constant motion as possible, and engaging in full range of motion in your movements.

Question: Name as many of the other considerations in creating a warm up as you can think of and post them to Comments.

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