An ideal warm-up can routinely be completed in about 10-20 minutes, depending on the movements in your workout that day. A perfect warm-up should always include the following elements:

• Wake-Up (3-5 minutes)
• Loosen-Up (5-7 minutes)
• Fire-Up (5-7 minutes)

I would like to note that older athletes (35+), those that have noticeable movement deficiencies, or someone with a known injury should add an additional 5-10 minutes of targeted mobility work to his or her regimen.

The Wake-Up

Start each workout session with some low-level, steady-state cardio. Minimum effective dose here is about 3-5 minutes. You need to get your tissues moving and heart rate up since many of us are walking into the gym after a night of sleep or a full day of work. Choose whatever you’d like: run, row, bike, ski, or jump rope. Whatever it is, just make sure you have a light sweat going when you’re done.

Time to Loosen Up

Now that you have a light sweat going, it is time to address your mobility. I’m a huge fan of the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) when it comes to anything in the fitness realm. Choose 1-2 body parts that will be primarily utilized during your workout. Here is a (super) quick reference:

• Upper body pressing: chest, triceps, and thoracic spine
• Upper body pulling: lats, t-spine, biceps, and forearms
• Lower body squatting: glutes, quads, ankles (really anything lower body)
• Lower body pulling: glutes and hamstrings

If you are anything like me, you probably feel like you need help in all those areas. Remember, consistency is key; don’t try to do everything all at once. I always keep the focus on my biggest problem areas in every warm up (glutes and chest) and then rotate the secondary areas at each session.

The prescription is, again, very simple. Stretch each area for 1 minute on each side or 2 minutes total if it is a bilateral movement. I usually do each stretch twice through, which puts me at 8 minutes total.

Fire Up the Engine

The final part of your warm-up is where you begin to add in the movements that you’ll be completing in your workout. This is completed in two phases. First, use slow and controlled movements with little to no weight. Second, implement fast lifts with moderate weight, between 30-50% of your 1 rep max.

The slow and controlled reps should be done with no more than an empty barbell, and I would generally recommend most people keep their first few lifts un-weighted. You want to move at a pace in which you can complete the exercise with perfect form. As Coach Burgener says: “Practice makes permanent.” Athletes with mobility issues should alter the movement so that they can perform it perfectly; for example, you can place something under your feet to raise your heels for squats.

We are in the homestretch of your warm up and now it is time to add some speed to your movements. Keep the weight light in relation to the workout ahead. Your focus should remain on proper form but your movements should be crisp and snappy. Squats should be fast out of the hole, pulls should finish quick, and presses should have a strong lockout. No more than 2-5 reps should be used to ensure top speed is maintained.

All in all, this portion of the warm-up should take 5-8 minutes. This may fluctuate depending on your urgency of movement. If pressed for time, I would structure the “fire-up” portion in an EMOM (Every Minute On the Minute) structure.

Bringing It All Together

When it comes to warm-ups, there is an unlimited number of movements and ways of implementation. The key is to start simple and find what works for you. Don’t concern yourself with “neural pathway priming” and “CNS activation.” Break a light sweat, stretch, and work on perfecting your mechanics in every movement. Everything else you may read about is a micro-iteration of those fundamentals.

The post The Athlete’s Toolbox: Blueprint of the Perfect Warm Up appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Every day, we, as athletes, dedicate precious time in the gym with the goal of improving our current self. Even if it is 45 minutes slammed in the middle of our busy work day, the time spent in the gym is sacred. Any fitness article, magazine, or headline that you read will bombard you with exercises you “should” be doing or routines you “should” be following. But have you ever asked yourself if your body is capable of performing these programs or exercises?

Placing strenuous exercise on a malfunctioning system is a recipe for injury, but how do we know what, if anything, is functionally wrong with us? The key to identifying these issues lies within your posture. Evaluating your posture can identify tight musculature, unbalanced strength within the system, and the causes of persistent pain. The good news is that even if you have a malfunctioning system, it can be fixed. You need to have a trained eye, functional know-how, and the patience to rebuild your fundamental mechanics. Does that sound easy?

The odds are that without the proper help, you will not be able to successfully fix yourself. For one, most do not have the proper physiological understanding of the body. Secondly, it is near impossible to fix what feels, for all intensive purposes, “natural” to you.

There Is Hope to Fix Your Mechanics

Although I cannot provide you with trained eye (unless you want to fly me out—I love to travel), I can provide you with the functional know-how to assess and correct your current posture. All you need to bring to the table is your unbeatable mind and the agreement that you will push the limits of your patience.

First, we must identify what proper posture looks like. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man provides a great glimpse into the inner workings of the human body. His work is a quintessential depiction of balance—and that is what perfect posture always boils down to at its purest form. Static posture must be balanced within the sagittal plane (right versus left) as well as the coronal plane (front versus back). Disruption within these planes causes imbalances that beget dysfunction and eventually cause pain.

The skeletal and muscular systems play the largest role within the body regarding posture. The following instruction will focus on the muscular system, as that is the only system of the two in which you can make a functional change. Our muscular system creates postural imbalances due to range of motion issues and unbalanced strength/activation between opposing muscles (think quads versus hamstrings). With most people, believe it or not, this stems from strength imbalances, not true range of motion issues.

It is vitally important from here on out to understand that your muscles never truly “turn off.” Your body simply remodels your motor patterns to compensate for poor postural habits. If you sit down all day, odds are your hip flexors are tight which then wreaks havoc on your ability to use your glutes properly. This pattern of equal and opposite will repeat itself over and over.

Now, let’s build your posture from the ground up.

Feet and Knees: Proper Posture and Fixing Overpronation

Feet should be parallel to each other when standing. Big toes should be firmly planted into the ground with the arch of your foot rigid and stacked off the floor. Your knees should be stacked over the midline of your foot.

Improper foot posture is seen primarily when your toes are turned out. Turned out toes are an easy indictor of ROM issues and underuse within your posterior hip muscles (gluteus) as well as tight, overactive anterior musculature (quads, psoas, TFL, and adductors).

Left: Correct Foot Position, Right: Incorrect Foot Position

Standing with your toes turned out also leads to the knee aligning over the inside of the foot. This is known as Pronation Distortion Syndrome and often leads to foot issues such as plantar fascitis. It also compromises the ACL in the knee.

I’ve used a simple trick with several athletes to help alleviate this problem. I will place two 25lb plates on the outside of the athlete’s feet and then have them actively press the sides of their feet into the plate. After a few seconds the athlete should feel the sides of their hips begin to burn a bit (“turn on”). I’ll start an athlete with this in a static position for 4 sets of 10-30 second holds. Add time as they get more confident and comfortable with this activation movement. You can have the athlete progress this by performing body weight squats while pressing into the plates. Always make sure their foot stays flat on the floor and their big toes do not come off the ground. I have seen this process take 3-4 weeks of practice before it starts to take hold in more higher intensity settings, like during a workout for example.

The Hips: Proper Posture and Fixes for Hip Imbalance

Your hips first should have equal weight distribution across both feet. Your gluteus muscles and lower abdominals should be equally engaged in order to properly set the lumbar spine.

A very common problem is seen in athletes who commonly shift weight primarily to one foot when standing. This is called asymmetrical weight distribution. This weight shift can cause the hips to be improperly engaged during movements. You’ll notice the imbalance if they trouble lunging on a particular leg or if their hips shift to the side during squats and deadlifts.

Left: Correct Hip Position; Right: Incorrect Hip Position

Another common problem is anterior pelvic tilt/lower cross syndrome. This is seen in approximately 70% of the population. It arises from overactive/tight anterior musculature and under activation of the posterior musculature of the hips in addition to nonexistent lower abdominal engagement.

Left: Correct Pelvic Tilt; Right: Incorrect Pelvic Tilt

To fix asymmetrical weight distribution, constant reminders can be used, either verbally from a coach or intrinsically by the athlete, to correct their own weight distribution over and over.

To fix anterior pelvic telt, include the “dead-bug” exercise into your daily warm up routine. It is the best way I have found to correct an anterior pelvic tilt. It engages your lower abdominals and helps you to learn how a neutral spine feels. I cue my athletes to press their belly button into the ground when performing the dead-bug. As with the standing plate exercise above, we progress athletes from 10 seconds up to a 30 second hold. From there, you can progress the athletes by having them move their limbs while keeping the lower abdominals engaged into the floor.

The Shoulders: Proper Posture and Upper Cross Syndrome Fix

Your scapula (shoulder blade) should sit flush against the backside of your rib cage with your lower traps and lats engaged to keep your scapula from rounding forward. Moreover, your hands should rest with your thumbs facing forward and your arms by your sides.

Upper Cross Syndrome is a combination of tight anterior musculature and weak/disengaged posterior musculature. Sound familiar? Tight, overused pectoral muscles internally rotate our shoulders, and our weak lower traps and lats cannot pull the scapula down back into its normal place.

Left: Correct Shoulder Positioning; Right: Incorrect Shoulder Positioning

In addition, athletes who engage in CrossFit (most specifically) tend to compound this issue with the high volume of cleans and snatches. Overuse of the upper trap, used during shrugging movements, will amplify existing shoulder issues often leading to Shoulder Impingement Syndrome.

In order to retrain the scapula we must first develop awareness and then strengthen the appropriate musculature. My favorite drill for upper back postural awareness is the “Belt Pull-down Drill.” The video demonstration is below.

Similar to the above exercises mentioned, we start athletes with a handful of holds lasting around 10 seconds. We progress them up to 30 seconds and add movements like a basic hip hinge into the mix. This will increase the athlete’s postural awareness during moves like the deadlift or power clean.

Spend the Time Fixing Poor Patterns

When you move correctly you have to do less in the gym to achieve more results. I cannot recommend highly enough setting aside the 5-10 minutes daily to ingrain these movement patterns into your neurological system. Once they become second nature you can back off and complete these as neural cueing drills on applicable days (shoulder girdle on overhead heavy days or dead-bugs on lower body heavy days). However, it can never hurt to truly master the basics of human motion, especially when striving for elite levels of fitness.

The post The Athlete’s Toolbox: Build Your Base With Postural Mechanics appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Successful athletes are a rare breed. They posses an uncommon work ethic, an ever-growing set of physical skills, and a wide knowledge base regarding their craft. Do not be fooled however, athletic development does not begin and end on the playing field. It is my assertion that athletic prowess is the underlying key to longevity. It is a pursuit of unending mastery that should never be abandoned.

In the first article of this series, The Athlete’s Toolbox: An Unbeatable Mind, I discussed an athlete’s mindset. The mental state an athlete must refine and integrate into their every decision. An unbeatable mind will not only open up a path to success for you, it will also guide you back during those dark days in defeat.

Today, I want to open a discussion into the lost art of breathing. It is a component of the truly elite performers that is criminally ignored by the masses. Many of us search for advantages on the peripheral, that small micro change that can bump our performance and fitness to the next level. What we fail to see is the big elephant in the room staring us in the face. Just as the skill of locomotion doesn’t end with a baby’s first step, breathing is not simply a matter of inhalation and exhalation.

The Mechanics of Breathing

Before we can hope to improve your breathing, we must understand how the process should work. During inhalation, your diaphragm does most of the work. The diaphragm is a muscle that attaches in a dome shape to your rib cage and abdominal wall. When you breathe in, the domed diaphragm flattens out, expanding your rib cage and pushing your abdominal wall out due to the increase in pressure from your organs dropping/compressing.

Conversely, resting exhalation is largely an involuntary process, but the portion we care about is “forced” exhalation—the type of breathing you should use during sport and exercise. This is accomplished through the rectus and transverse abdominals as well as the obliques contracting and forcing the wind back out of your airways.

There is a laundry list of psychological and physiological benefits of properly done deep breathing. Today, I’ll keep it to those most related to performance enhancement. First, deep breathing helps you to de-stress and boosts your cardiovascular endurance through a similar mechanism (yes, my fellow fitness pros, I know that is boiled down to the n-th degree but it suffices for this article).

Proper breathing activates your Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS), which is the portion of the autonomic nervous system responsible for rest and digestion. Shallow breathing activates your sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which is the system responsible for your “flight or fight” response. Without getting too deep on these nervous systems, suffice it to say that stimulation of the PNS promotes recovery and energy conservation, while stimulation of the SNS promotes additional stress and, as we know, stress is counterproductive to your health and wellness, to say the least.

Proper breathing is also critical during stretching and weight training. While lifting weights, deep breathing with subsequent core engagement activates the Valsalva Maneuver. The Valsalva Maneuver is a forceful exhalation against a close airway. Think about clenching your stomach as if you were about to get punched and you’ll get the idea. The Valsalva Maneuver is extremely useful while lifting weights as it greatly increases pressure and stability around your organs and spine, which, in turn, makes your lifts easier—win-win! The Valsalva maneuver is well known around coaching circles although it is archaically cued by most with a simple “stay tight” but that is a separate article in and of itself.

The lesser-known benefit of deep breathing comes into play while stretching. Proper breathing while stretching effectively increases your venous return—the amount of blood that is pumped back to your heart. An increased venous return has many benefits but most notably to performance it aids in the disposal of metabolic waste that arises from exercise.

Now, let’s test your breathing

Take five breaths in and out and note the following characteristics:

• Did your chest expand or your abs inflate?
• How long did you inhale for? Exhale? Were those times comparable?
• Did you really have to concentrate during your breathing sequence or was it very natural?

Odds are only your chest/lungs expanded during the breath, you had a relatively large inhale (5-10 count) and a very quick exhale where almost all of the air was out in a matter of moments. This is called shallow breathing and is seen in about 90% of the population, especially during bouts of exercise. Shallow breathing uses the chest muscles (scalenes, SCM, and pectorals) to inflate the chest and then uses the elastic recoil of the muscles to dispel air from your lungs.

So, how and what do we need to do to improve?

There are three breathing techniques you should master. I’ve thrown in a fourth for any of you deep divers (pun intended).

Technique One: Breath Awareness (Level: Requirement for Everyone)

I introduced this to you a second ago, but the first step in fixing your breathing is to simply become aware of it. Set aside as little as one minute a day to focus on nothing else but deep, symmetrical breathing. Inhale through the nose, inflate the abdominals, and slowly exhale through the nose matching your inhale tempo. Simple? Sure. But it really does make a difference. To take it a step further, try to maintain perfect posture while you breathe. I roll my shoulders and gently shrug them up and down to keep the tension out of them in my daily practice.

Technique Two: Box Breathing (Level: Ninja Apprentice)

I learned this technique via Mark Devine. This technique is great for meditative purposes and also aids in lung capacity development. For box breathing, you inhale, hold your breath full, exhale completely, and hold your breath empty. You do each of these for the same number of seconds. Assuming that you already graduated from the first technique, I would perform this for 5-10 counts at each “station” and repeat for 10-20 full breathing cycles. As always, start easy and work your way up.

Technique Three: Breathing Ladder (Level: Rich Froning)

For all my competitive exercisers out there, performing breathing ladders is a great way to learn how to breathe mid-workout. Breathing ladders are structured work-to-rest intervals where the rest period is timed by your breaths. Ladders can be structured in two common ways. When first working with breathing ladders you should progress exercise repetitions with an equal number of breaths. For example, I would do five kettlebell swings and then rest while I take five deep breaths. I would then pick up the kettlebell and perform six swings, put down the kettlebell and take six deep breaths—so on and so forth. The key to remember with breathing ladders is that the deeper you breathe, the more rest time you get. This will in turn teach you to take deeper breaths the next time you are tired in a workout.

Once you get the hang of breathing ladders with equal reps-to-breath, you should progress to a standardized breath count, wherein your reps increase but your breaths between each set do not. Start with around five breaths per set and see how high you can climb the ladder of reps before your breath gives out. Rich Froning is known for timing his rest intervals with his breath count. It is the reason (among many) that he can sustain such consistent and blistering workout times while making it look so effortless. Practice this technique and you will be on your way, too.

Technique Four: Apnea Training (Level: David Blaine)

David Blaine famously held his breath for 17 minutes and 4 seconds on television a few years back. He employed this apnea technique to complete the feat. Think back to the “box breathing” technique where in each component of the breathing process had equal time. With apnea training, you inhale x1, hold x4, and exhale x2. For example, a 2 second inhale would require an 8 second hold and a 4 second exhale. Repeat the breathing scheme for 5-7 minutes when first starting out.

As a disclaimer, this technique can be dangerous if practiced improperly due to the oxygen constraints. Start at the 1/4/2 scheme and progress 1 second at a time.

Don’t Make It Complicated

Do not overcomplicate the topic of breathing. A successful athlete will master the basics of breathing by including daily mindfulness work each day. Given time, the basics will develop into a useful skill within workouts. You don’t need to learn to hold your breath for 10 minutes to become an efficient breather, nor will these techniques make you into an ultra-marathoner in a matter of months. However, it will make that little difference at that end of workouts where instead of fizzing out you’re pushing even harder towards the finish line. That is the hallmark of a successful breather, competent athlete, and it makes one proud coach.

Continue by reading:

• The Athlete’s Toolbox: An Unbeatable Mind

The post The Athlete’s Toolbox: The Lost Art of Breathing appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Successful athletes understand basic psychology, exercise science, nutrition, and can work through a majority of their problems on their own. A true coach is always there to provide a structural framework, mastery knowledge, and persistent motivation to refocus them towards their goals, but they possess the core tools of athletic competence.

After watching hundreds of clients over the years, I have come up with eight tools for the competent athlete’s toolbox. These eight tools span several disciplines that are all crucial to an athlete’s successful mental and physical development over their lifespan.

The first principle, covered in this article, tackles the greatest asset an athlete possesses—their mind. Mental fortitude separates successful athletes from their peers. The great athletes and achievers among us have a very similar emotional profile. They are emotionally agile, introspective, and uniquely goal-driven.

The Role of Emotional Agility

The pursuit of your health and wellness goals, also known as training, seldom follows a path of perpetual progress. There are twists and turns, ups and downs, periods of tremendous progress, and spells of barren backslides. Training, like life, is not linear, and the down times will throw serious demons your way. Recognizing and understanding how to react in times of strife and struggle is paramount for a successful athlete. The skill of learning how to react to negative emotions and challenges is called emotional agility.

Emotional agility teaches us to treat emotions as data points, not as right or wrong. Your brain uses negative emotions the same way your body uses pain, to alert you that something is wrong (or right). If we do not know how to process and respond to negative emotions then they will begin to grab hold and manifest themselves in our actions. Left unchecked, negative emotions begin to drive our actions in a way that detaches us away from our values. We must develop emotional agility to help us overcome this pattern. Learning how to identify and accept unpleasant situations that arise during training can help you break the emotional patterns that are holding you back.

This skill becomes even more critical in today’s age of social media. We are constantly bombarded by other athletes’ successes every hour of every day. It’s easy to begin thinking that everyone else is leaving you in the dust while you struggle day in and day out. Although we may logically know that this cannot be the case, it does not stop the negative emotions from pouring in over us. We are helpless if we do not know how to respond to these suffocating feelings of inadequacy and failure.

How Is Emotional Agility Developed?

The solution is simple, but the application will be a practice in the art of trial and error. The first big step is simply being aware that negative circumstances and emotions will present themselves and it is okay to feel a certain way. Emotional awareness will develop into the agility to then react and respond to any emotion or circumstance. Once we become emotionally aware, true emotional agility stems from having a plan of attack when confronted by a negative scenario. Honestly ask yourself:

• Am I emotionally agile?
• How easily am I your dissuaded from your goals?

Does a disappointing weigh-in often lead to an all-day binge or possibly falling all the way off the dietary wagon? What plan can you enact instead to combat this cycle?

A successful athlete has the emotional agility to not only recognize negative emotions, but they have a plan ready to combat and circumvent those emotions in order to sustain themselves on the path to success.

Use Introspection

An obsessively introspective mindset is the hallmark of a champion. A successful athlete will dwell on factors that they control, instead of complaining about factors outside of his or her control. Once a plan is set in place a successful athlete will pursue it with blinders on and solely focus on the pursuit of the goal.

I constantly see unsuccessful clients at the gym come and go due to one extraneous excuse after another:

• “I’m too busy.”
• “I can’t eat the food I’m supposed to.”
• “I don’t like this programming.”

You name it. I’ve heard it.

We have an unending list of excuses at our disposal, and our egos will use them to protect us from challenges outside of our norm. A lazy athlete stops at the excuse. They present no solutions to their challenges. A successful athlete will see the same challenges but will instead think:

• “How can I fit my workouts into my schedule?”
• “What can I do in order to stick to my diet?”

We all have extraneous roadblocks that will impede our progress. Are you an athlete who stops at the excuse, or do you seek out solutions to your problems? A successful athlete will always first look within to find a solution.

Triage Your Goals

A fairly obvious characteristic of a successful athlete is one who is goal-driven. In order to keep you tuned in however, I’d like to share a seldom-discussed aspect surrounding goals, and that is triage.

A successful athlete knows how to triage their goals. Triage is the process of determining the priority or urgency of need. A successful athlete does not attempt to tackle 10 goals at once. The problem with pursuing too many goals is simply a matter of logistics. You cannot expend the personal resources (time, energy, etc.) necessary when you are split in 10 different directions. Successful athletes may have 10 goals, but they independently pursue each one.

We witness this phenomenon in action every year around January 1st. A person who already claims to have no time over the holidays between kids, work, family visiting, cooking, and whatever else is in their life decides to make a New Year’s resolution to workout five days a week, read three books a month, learn to play the guitar, write poetry, and volunteer every weekend at the local homeless shelter. While these are admirable goals, it is wildly impractical to think you can pile these together all at once. The inability to triage goals is single-handedly the reason so many people fail to see their goals through to completion.

Goal triaging allows you to differentiate between important goals that will make a significant impact in your life and which are just noise. So often, those “noise” goals derail us from what truly matters right this minute. If you focus on the most important goals, and fully commit to them, you will likely find that they are the “big domino” that sets a cascading effect of accomplishment down the entirety of your goal list. To be successful, you need to be able to identify what goals need immediate attention. The largest holes in your health and wellness must be addressed first. Find what is important and purse it, relentlessly.

The Power of a Strong Mental Make Up

Successful athletes come in all shapes and sizes, but their mental makeup is consistent across the board. They can recognize deficiencies, set a plan, and put it into action. This may sound simplistic, but the magic comes from their ability to react, reset, and refocus as many times as is needed throughout the process. Their external environment is never a crutch, as they will always look within for future improvements over past mistakes. The successful athlete cannot be mentally beat because they never truly fail. Failure would indicate quitting. A successful athlete learns from a momentary failure to create a lasting culture of success for themselves and those around them.

Continue with:

• The Athlete’s Toolbox: The Lost Art Of Breathing

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