Archive: Around Town

One lesson that regular exercisers can take from athlete strength and conditioning is the process of getting excited.  I know you get excited at the mere thought of working out.  In this case, though, it is the process of exciting your central nervous system.      Consider your normal productivity (at home or work) for a moment; are you more productive when you are half-asleep or when you are awake?  Just like drinking your coffee in the morning, you have to give your body a dose of "exercise caffeine" before your workout.  Consider adding some rapid response exercises, low force-high speed movements to set your body up for a better workout session.

Quick rapid response exercises should occur after your general warmup. Examples would be short 10-15 second bouts of jump rope, fast jumping jacks, 'quick hands-quick feet' running in place, foot drills through an agility ladder, or hopping drills on a dot mat. An analogy used by strength coach Mark Verstegen (Athlete's Performance) is to think of your body like a pogo stick; any rapid response movement should make you 'pogo' like, moving in a high neuromuscular frequency.

The addition of quick nervous system-stimulating movement to your warmup better prepares your body for the training session or workout. The theory behind repetitive sewing machine-like movements is that they improve the communication between your muscles and the nervous system.

Your muscle fibers are told what to do by your brain via the spinal cord and nerves. These partnerships are called motorneurons and the better they communicate, the better your movement; the better your movement, the better your workout; the better your workout, the better your adaptations, such as building strength or building muscle.  How well they speak with each other can be improved with your chosen exercises, the intensity of your lifting, or even better, your warmup routine.

Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove, authors of The New Rules of Lifting, cite two main points to take away from their 'warm-up' chapter. 1. You will lift better, with less risk of injury, if you take a few minutes to prepare your body for the task. 2. Walking on a treadmill or riding a stationary bike doesn't prepare your body for the task of lifting (heavy) weights. Verstegen brings up a functional reason for exciting your nervous system, not just in warmup. A body with well developed elasticity is going to react quickly in real life to keep you from tumbling if you slip and start to fall.

Kudos to you if you warm-up at all being that it is mostly blown off by the general exercise population. A training rule-of-thumb to go by is 'If you don't have time to warm-up, you don't have time to train.'  If you happen to do the right thing and warm-up, enhance your workout by exciting your nervous system with some fast rapid response exercises.

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