Hands up who didn’t manage a 10 minute warm up at efforts yesterday? 🙄 I get it, sometimes I’m a bit of a nag insisting my runners do jog for 10 minutes before an efforts session or a race, but it’s for a good reason.
Such is the importance of a good warm up for all sporting activities, a chap called Ian Jeffries came up with the RAMP method. He’s even managed to write an entire book on Warm Ups. It’s 216 pages long and is available for around £22. Don’t all rush to Waterstones at once.
I’ll also add if your book order arrives with a picture of Mr Motivator on the front, you’ve ordered the wrong copy.
In all seriousness, warm ups can be an important part of your training plan. I won’t go into too much details about the RAMP Method but let you know it stands for Raise, Activate, Mobilise and Potentiate.
So the idea being we start off relatively slowly to increase our heart rate and loosen our muscles. This would be our 10 minute easy jog. In the activate and mobilise phase, us runners might introduce some Dynamic Stretches to focus on specific muscle groups. So your hamstring sweeps, quad holds, leg swings and open/close the gate.
The Potentiate phase then focuses on more specific exercises aimed at the session you are about to complete. So on Tuesday evenings we’ve done some low knee drills, fast feet for cadence and my favourite, A Skips. All these are designed to imitate running to some degree and leave you ready to smash out the session.
So in an ideal world, a warm up for an effort session or a big race would look something like this.
10 minutes Easy
Dynamic Stretches (eg Toe Walking, Leg Swings, Hamstring Sweeps, Quad Holds)
Running Drills (A-Skips, Low Knees, Grapevine, High Knees, Butt Kicks)
Strides
I know what you are probably thinking, how long will that take? To be honest, anywhere up to 30 minutes and that is the ultimate dilemma. It’s all well and good me preaching about the importance of the warm up, but in reality, most of us just don’t have the time to do an extra half an hour before the session.
Even on the Tuesday evening, I keep the Warm Up limited to about 15 minutes as I know you’re keen to get stuck into the reps (or get it over with perhaps).
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So whilst the WU is important, this is where you need to factor in your availability. No doubt some of you have seen influencers on instagram or Tik Tok zooming in on their 5am alarm call and then showing us how in depth their warm up is. Impressive. But that could be damaging to your recovery if you’re missing out on important sleep. What’s more important, the extra long warm up, or making sure you’ve got enough kip? The latter.
So once you have a good understanding on how much time you have available to warm up, it’s then wise to make use of that time as efficiently as possible. Often the best warm up for a session is to run for 10 minutes. If one of the team turns up late on a Tuesday morning, I’ll encourage them to do some extra laps, rather than jump straight into the drills. This is to ensure they complete the “Raise” part of the RAMP method first.
So if 10 minutes is all you can spare, run for 10 minutes. If you can spare an extra 5-10 minutes then you might want to focus on any problem areas. I’ve been having issues with a foot injury during my latest plan so have started making sure I do the following exercises to focus on that area and making sure I’m ready for my session.
Toe Walking
Heel Walking
Bunny Hops
Hop N Hold
Those 4 exercises take me about 2-3 minutes to complete.
If you’re struggling with abductor or adductor pain you might want to introduce some side skips or the Grapevine drill. If you’re looking to improve your cadence then doing drills such as step ups, fast feet and butt kicks can really focus on that light, quick motion that is needed to increase your step rate.
Or if it’s your stride length you are looking to improve then A-Skips, Bounding and Strides would be a better warm up for you.
So in summary whilst warming up is important, you need to first ask yourself how much time do I have? Then how best can I utilise that time to help improve my running, stay injury free and prepare me for the session ahead.
For any of you on the Team that would like to discuss your warm routine, drop me a message. I’ll then send you a link to the 216 Warm Up Bible written by one of the least popular dinner guests, Mr Jeffries.
