- Does your low back, your hips, your knees or your ankles
bother you during your leg training sessions?
Today, I'm gonna be walking you
through a four part warmup protocol
to reduce your risk of injury
and also help you maximize your performance.
(electronic music)
My name's Cameron, doctor of physical therapy
and strength and conditioning coach
and today I'm gonna be running you
through a four part warmup specifically for your leg day.
So if you're doing any squats or dead lifts.
I want you to remember four letters, R-A-M-P, ramp.
We're gonna raise our body temperature,
activate those key muscles and movement patterns,
mobilize our joints and then potentiate our nervous system.
So we're gonna start off on the Airbike today.
Again, you can use other pieces of equipment,
a treadmill, an elliptical.
If you don't have any of that,
jogging in place or even doing jumping Jack's works great
but the Airbike is really great
because I can get a full 360 degree effort of his legs here.
We get into some deeper hip and ankle ranges of motion.
Again, we really wanna make sure as we're doing this
we're increasing the blood flow to those working muscles
and really raising our body temperature.
So as he's on the Airbike here,
I'm having him focus on not only just pushing down
but pulling through and focusing on contracting
through each degree of that pedal stroke.
We really want this to be non-fatiguing.
It's part of our warm up specifically for our leg day,
so no high intensity intervals.
Keep it real easy conversational pace,
five to 10 minutes here.
Next we want to activate those muscles.
Now one muscle group that really gets neglected
in a lot of our leg workouts are the outsides of our hips.
Really important muscle for stabilizing our hips
and protecting our lower back.
I'm gonna have Kale come down.
He's gonna slightly kneel.
He's gonna raise his right leg
and we're gonna do some standing fire hydrants.
He's gonna try and keep his hip, knee and toe
stable throughout the exercise.
He's breaking the band apart.
Bringing that knee out, hips are staying squared up.
He should really be feeling the muscles
on the outsides of his hips working here.
With this exercise, again, we don't want it to be fatiguing.
Two to three sets, five to 10 reps, each leg.
So we activated some of those key muscles in our hip.
Next we're gonna mobilize the hips, the knees, the ankles.
So Kale's gonna be using the squat rack here.
He's gonna hold onto the rack and he's gonna use that rack
to support his weight as he drops down
into a comfortable squat stance for him.
He's gonna rock side to side and just mobilize the hips,
the knees, the ankles, try and get into his end range.
Now if you can't get as low as Kale, that's fine.
It's all about your end range.
So you might be halfway rocking side to side.
That's perfect.
You really just wanna make sure
that you're mobilizing into your end range.
Again, we don't want this to be fatiguing.
So let's aim for two to three sets of five to 10 rocks.
So the final piece of our warmup here is P,
potentiate the nervous system.
We want to get all the leg muscles,
all the hip muscles working together.
So we're gonna do some bench jumps right now.
I'm gonna have Kale do three to five reps
as hard as he can.
Jump and then step down.
We don't want to jump off the bench here.
So as he does is you can see he fully extends
through the ankles, the knees and the hips
to generate all that power into that box jump.
After you finish your warmup and you're getting
into your actual training session.
If Kale's gonna be squatting 135 pounds today,
he's not just gonna jump from the warmup to 135 pounds.
He wants to ramp those weights up as well.
So he might do a few sets, two to three
with just the barbell and then two to three sets
at 95 pounds to really make sure
that he gets used to being under the bar
and make that smooth transition towards his training sets.
So remember, raise your body temperature,
activate those key muscles and movements,
mobilize the entire lower body, the hips, the knees
and the ankles and finish off by potentiating
the nervous system, get everything firing fast and hard.