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Barry
Barry Oglesby is a professional MMA fighter and BJJ player, in addition to being the owner and head coach of Kyuzo Gym in Dublin, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu school. He also works as a Strength and Conditioning coach at a North Dublin secondary school, and can be found on the commentary team on Cage Contender, Ireland’s largest MMA show.
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He can be contacted through the GrapplerMan.com website.
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Warming up: Physically and Mentally

by: Barry Oglesby

I’m sure you won’t fall off your chair in surprise when I tell you this, but a good warm up is important. That being said, it seems not everyone is aware of what they should set out to achieve when they start to warm up their team. Here’s a brief outline of what a warm up should do.

* Prepare the athlete physically for the tasks ahead

* Prepare the athlete mentally for the tasks ahead

That’s really about it, but I’m going to add one more bullet point in.

* Immediately and cumulatively guard against injury

We’ll deal with that one a little later on. But let’s get to the first two points right now.

* Prepare the athlete physically for the tasks ahead

While this seems like an obvious one, physical preparation is a little more complicated than just raising body temperature and doing some stretches. We want to make sure that our players are physically prepared for the specific tasks that they’re going to be undertaking. For example, if I am taking a soccer team for a warm up when they were going to be working with their coach in a session based on developing tactical awareness, my warm up will be different to if I was taking them through a speed session. My priority in the latter instance would be to ensure proper mobilisation and activation of the lower body in particular, whereas in the former case, I might choose a more general warm up at a slower pace. This brings me to the second of the two initial points.

Prepare the athlete mentally for the tasks ahead

Now pay attention down the back and try not to giggle because I’m going to use a rude word. Your job when warming up your athletes is to arouse them. Now that we’ve said it, let’s define it. Arousal is essentially a heightened mental state. If I want to get a large group of 20 footballers to train well in an agility session from the get go, then I want to give them a warm up that is going to progressively build in intensity towards the actual work of the session. Likewise, if my job is to warm up 10 MMA fighters before a sparring session, I want them to be mentally ready to train. To understand what I mean, it can help to think of the opposite of arousal, which is relaxation. Think about what deep static stretching or foam rolling does. Unless it’s particularly painful, it has a tendency to relax and take your heart rate down. This would be an unsuitable warm up for an intense session. A more suitable warm up would be something that starts out with some mobilisation and then progressively builds in intensity towards the task in hand.

Finally, the little point I added as an addendum.

Immediately and cumulatively guard against injury

It makes sense that a good warm up would guard against injury by mobilising, though interestingly, not necessarily “warming up” the soft tissues of the body. If for example, we effectively mobilise the soft tissues around the hips, our athletes will experience less strain on the hamstrings during sprinting exercises. This is the immediate effect of a good warm up. However the second, and perhaps more important, effect is cumulative. Good warm ups that include effective mobilisation and stabilisation of the joints that need it can help to prevent bad postural, movement, and gait issues from taking root. Using the hips as an example once again, tight hip flexors can be helped to loosen and mobilise through regular mobility work in the warm ups such as deep lunging or hurdle steps. One session of these might assist in warming the athlete up for now, but the cumulative effect over several sessions will make a more long term difference.

These are the basic aims of the warm up. In my next article I’ll go through a specific warm up example and explain the terms a little more practically. I may even use the word arousal again.





CATEGORY: Training