Time for Exercise

One of the easiest mistakes to make when exercising is to forget to warm up. After all, you’re probably doing it on a tight schedule, and how important are warmup exercises after all?

Plenty important!

A good warmup decreases the chance for injury. It gets your body ready for exercise, so you can actually exercise more effectively.

Warmup exercises do take time to do right. The exercises you need to perform to warm up depend on the exercises you will be doing, but you should always start out the same:

Start with about 5 minutes of light cardiovascular exercise. Do whatever form you like, but don’t start challenging yourself at this point. Walk or slowly jog on the treadmill, row with very little weight, ride the stationary bicycle with low resistance, that kind of thing. You aren’t trying to build muscle mass or endurance at this point, so take it easy.

For each exercise you do after this, you should warm up a little before getting serious. If you’re lifting weights, do a few reps first with about half your usual weight. Then increase a little do a few more, increase a little, do a few more, until you get to where you want to be working out. Don’t try to tire yourself out doing these; that is not the idea.

Do similarly for each kind of exercise. If you like to run on the treadmill, start at a walk for a minute, go to a fast walk, then to a jog, etc., until you reach your full speed.

Never mistake your warmup for a waste of time. You don’t want to be injured because your body wasn’t properly prepared to exercise. Yes, you may have felt fine when you started, but if your body wasn’t ready to exercise, you’re taking a chance on getting an injury that warming up could have easily prevented or limited.