New students often arrive five minutes late, assuming the warm-up is the part you can skip. Two months in they arrive five minutes early, because they discover it is the part that stops them aching the next day.
Here is what we do and why in that order.
Why we do not stretch cold
First, what we do not do: long static stretching at the start.
A cold muscle held in a long stretch does not lengthen; it protects itself - contracting reflexively to prevent injury. On top of that, a long stretch before loading temporarily reduces the ability to produce force, which is bad news for a practice built on structure.
Static stretching has its place. That place is at the end of the hour, when the body is warm.
The order we use
- Raise the temperature (3 minutes). Easy running, jumps, arm circles. Nothing demanding - the aim is simply to warm the tissue.
- Joints from the top down (5 minutes). Neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, trunk, hips, knees, ankles. Every joint through its full range, slowly and without force. This is the most important part and the one people most often skip at home.
- Dynamic stretching (4 minutes). Leg swings, lunges, torso circles. Moving through a stretch rather than holding it.
- Activation (3 minutes). Low stances, weight transfer, a few repetitions of a basic movement. The body moves from general warming into what it is about to do.
Why from the top down
Because desk work stores tension at the top - in the neck, shoulders and thoracic spine - and because that is also what most restricts breathing.
Open the chest at the start of the hour and your breath behaves differently for the whole session. Open it at the end and you have spent an hour breathing shallowly.
Flowing water never grows stale; a door hinge never gathers rust.
Why it is longer in the morning
In the 6:00 morning slot the warm-up runs closer to twenty minutes than fifteen.
The reason is physiological: the intervertebral discs have refilled with fluid overnight and the spine is considerably less pliable in the morning. The same sequence used at six in the evening would be too fast at dawn.
That is not a drawback of the morning slot but its advantage - slow morning opening does more for a spine than faster evening work.
What you can do at home
If you train at home or go running, use the same framework in a shorter version:
- Two minutes raising the temperature.
- Three minutes of joints from the top down. This is the part not to skip.
- Two minutes of dynamic stretching for whatever you are about to do.
Seven minutes. Less than the time you spend choosing a podcast.
What a warm-up actually does
Reduces injury risk. The most obvious and least interesting effect.
Increases your range for that hour. A stance that works after the warm-up would not have worked in the first five minutes.
Moves your head into the hall. For many people this is the main effect. Fifteen minutes of repetitive movement is the transition between work and training that everyone needs.
Shows you where you are today. The same warm-up every week is the best personal gauge there is. When a shoulder that worked last week does not work today, that means something.
Practicalities
Come ten minutes early so you can change without rushing. The warm-up is part of every class - mornings at 6:00 and afternoons at 17:30 and 18:30 at Ziherlova 44 in Ljubljana.
