I want to start writing a series of easy to understand articles aimed at beginners to progress and learn the discipline safely, so I’d like to start at the ground up and talk about our old friend the warm up!
Whenever we step out of our day-to-day lives and engage in any physically demanding activity, our bodies need to step up a gear to cope with the extra demands placed upon our bodies. It can take anywhere between 20 and 40 minutes from the time we start to exercise to the time our bodies reach their optimum performance.
After being in school, college or work all day, our bodies are not prepared to bounce, jump, climb and run all over the place. Diving into the big jumps with out warming up first could result in strains and tares to muscles, as well as damage to the joints and ligaments. Further to this, warm ups are proven to enhance performance – if injury isn’t an incentive, maybe performance is!
Your body only uses the energy that it needs to and no more. If you are not physically active for a long period of time, your body attempts to conserve energy. Your breathing shallows, your heart rate slows and the blood being delivered to your muscles decreases.
In a strange way, it is similar to the feeling of getting out of a car after a long journey. Your legs feel heavy and unresponsive as if they’re half asleep. You have to shake them out and move them about to get some life back into them, only then does walking start to feel natural again. It is just the process of taking your body up to a higher level of activity.
Along with the physical demands placed on the body, if you don’t warm up thoroughly, there is also the chance of slipping and falling on seemingly simple movements. It takes some time before jumps and techniques start to feel natural to our body and mind as our central nervous system, muscles and mind start to step up to the tempo.
You might have heard the original French Traceurs refer to this feeling in a few videos as your ‘touch’. It is the feeling of accuracy, control and lightness. To be able to jump and know exactly where your feet will touch down on the wall, or where your hands will grab.
Along with the dangers of not warming up, there are also the dangers of warming up incorrectly. One of the biggest mistakes is excessive stretching before training. Whilst some short, quick stretches can be beneficial before training, too much will weaken your muscles as well as the support that tendons and ligaments give to joints making you vulnerable to injury - as well as weakening you physically and as such, affecting your performance.
With this in mind, I’ve created a list of stages which will give you a basic template to work from for your own warm ups. Of course the plan below isn’t the only way to warm up, but it will give you a solid guide that will allow you to pencil in your own exercises and challenges whilst making sure you warm up thoroughly and effectively.
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Stage 1 - Joint Rotations
Start by moving each one of your joints through its range of motion one by one. Work from head to toe to make sure you don’t miss anything out. For example, you could start with your neck by looking up and down ten times, and then move onto your shoulders by rolling them backwards ten times and then forwards for ten.
These movements should be gentle and not place strain on the joints. By doing this you are starting to supply blood to your muscles, lengthen tendons and activate your central nervous system.
This is also called dynamic stretching, where a joint is taken through its range of motion without trying to increase that range of motion. This should not be mistaken with ballistic stretching, where a person attempts to push a stretch further with small ‘bounces’. Ballistic stretching is bad for you, it causes damage and is counter productive – so don’t do it!
Stage 2 - Cardio
Cardio, short for cardiovascular exercise, is exercise that works your heart, lungs and respiratory system as a whole. It is the system that pumps your blood and oxygen supplies to your muscles with fuel. Any exercise that makes you out of breath and leads to a light sweat is good, such as going for a short run or bouncing on the spot.
The point of this section is to raise your body temperature, to get blood pumping through your muscles and to start gradually increasing the intensity of the exercise.
Without increasing your heart rate (warming up your body, sending supplies to working muscles) you’re putting your body in a really vital position for injury to occur especially when impact is involved (running, jumping etc.).
Stage 3 - Light Strength work
Okay, now it’s time to put your muscles to work. This section of the warm up is to prepare your muscles for the stress and strains that they will be under taking during the session. In Parkour, we use most muscles in the body so you should go through and systematically work through them all.
It might help to think in terms of functional movements. Think about what you will be doing in your session. If the answer to that lots of jumping, then you should focus on your legs. Exercises like squats and lunges would be a good choice. If you are going to be swinging from your arms more in the session, your focus should be on exercises like pull ups and traverses to prepare your arms, shoulders and back muscles.
Start with slow, controlled exercises, like press ups and squats, and once you start to feel stronger and more capable, you can move onto doing more explosive movements, like clap press-ups or broad jumps, to prepare for your body for the dynamic movements in Parkour.
Stage 4 - Activity Specific Movements
By activity specific movements, I mean simple movements that are relevant to your sport or activity. In the case of Parkour, this would mean practicing low impact movements, vaults and jumps with the aim of activating your central nervous system.
Be creative and invent some challenges for yourself. You could set up a sequence of vaults and repeat it, or practice getting small jumps silent and perfectly accurate; anything to wake up your sense of accuracy and control of your movements.
Don’t step up the size or speed of the movements too quickly, take your time and ease your body and mind into your regular training until you are feeling alert and confident in your movements.
Doing a thorough warm up before any training session is not only vital to stay injury free, but also important for you to perform at your best. If you make a regular habit of it you’ll soon start to enjoy the process and reap the rewards.
-Tim
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