this is probably not gonna be one of my most popular videos but it should be.
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Hey everybody it's CJ Johnson. Of you're new here welcome. You're going to
find all things pickleball from paddles and equipment to skills and drills to
the fitness that will keep you healthy and on the court even longer. If you
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How many times have you gotten to the courts your friends are
already in the game, you're grab your pickleball paddle and all of a sudden
you're out there playing. That's not what you need to do.You need to take five
just five minutes to warm up. You're going to play better pickleball and reduce
your chance of injury. I'm going to show youthe quick routine that I do before I
play that gets my body ready to move.
We never want to stretch a cold body, One of
the first things I do when I get to the courts is just simply do a light jog
around the court to elevate my heart rate and get me breathing a bit,
You might remember this drill from gym class years ago. We called it suicides, Not only
am I continuing to elevate my heart rate but I'm starting to stretch out my legs
specifically my hamstrings every time I bend over.
Because there's so much lateral movement in pickleball it's important to warm up
those muscles as well, Shuffles are the perfect way to do that.
I like to end this part of the warm-up with a drill like karaoke. It continues to
warm up my body but now my brain gets more involved because of the complexity
of the movement.
Now this you got your heart rate up and you're ready to move you need to do a
little dynamic stretching. And that's just simply stretching using motion to
stretch. Not the old static stretching like we used to do when we're kids where
you bend down here and you just simply hold it. We save that for afterwards. So
here's a couple of dynamic stretches and I have this little routine to make it
easy to remember. Let's start with your hips first. So what you want to do is you
want to bring one leg up in the air and we're going to rotate that leg up and
out to the side. This is also a great balance exercise and if you're
struggling with your balance and most of us do as we get older, switch we're going to
go the other direction now. You want to click on the link that's coming up above
that's going to take you to a video that I did just on balance. So do this leg and
then go ahead and do the opposite side. Going out first and then coming back and
circling back towards the center. Do about 10 of those. If you can't do that
standing on one leg find something to hold on to. The pickleball net is about
the perfect height.
Next we're going to work on the knees and getting our knees
warmed up. So again we're gonna stand on one foot this time I want to draw a
circle but I'm drawing that circle with my knees so the movement is relatively
small but it's coming from my knee.One leg and then back in the opposite
direction and we want to do this of course on both sides. I like to do about
10 of these stretches and that generally
makes my body feel good hips knees now down to the ankles. Again standing on one
foot getting a lot of balance work in this morning. Standing on one foot rotate
the ankle in a big circle one direction and then the other. If you have a hard
time standing on one foot we're going to change make sure that you're spreading
your toes out. A lot of times we tense up our feet and it makes it harder to stand
on one foot. Okay both directions on that side Now we're going to move up and we're
going to move into the torso because we certainly do a lot of twisting when
we're playing pickleball. l do this very gently at first especially if we have a back
injury. Let's get your arms out here we're just going to simply twist our
torso we're leaving our feet relatively flat to the ground now as your body
starts to warm up. Go ahead and allow the motion to swing. Feel that turn happening
in your back. Okay now time to warm up the arms. So
this comes back from my golfing days we need to warm up those shoulder capsules.
Hold your arms straight out like this and we're going to lift up and down from
the shoulders. So I don't want to feel like it's from the neck where we're going
this way. Just inside the shoulder joint and this
is a pretty small movement because really the shoulder is not designed to have
large movement in that direction so just up and down. Do that ten times. Then
thumbs-up thumbs-down. Now we're doing the twisting motion. Then take your hands
like a jar open them up. Put them out to the side twisting back
and forth. Now let's move into the swimmer stretch. I'm sure you've seen
Michael Phelps or have seen some great swimmer. There in the pool and they're
always doing this. This is one of my favorite stretches it gets the back of
my arms. It gets my back so I really feel like I'm rounding this out and I'm
hugging myself. Another one that you see the swimmers do a lot are arm circles.
Big arm circles and you want to go forward and then of course you want to
take them back into the opposite direction. And then lastly we really
can't forget about that neck. Roll it around and roll it back in the opposite
direction. Again we're being pretty gentle because we're just getting our
body moving. Now I stop and I think okay is there anything else that
needs to be stretched? If there is I spend just a couple of more minutes
stretching that area so that I'm ready to play pickleball.
Most of us play pickleball in the morning for a variety of different
reasons and the research is showing that if you're playing in the morning your
body temperature is lower and that makes us more susceptible to injury . So Stop! I
want you to make a promise to me you can put it down in the comments below saying
I promise to stop running out onto the pickleball
court, grabbing your paddle and playing within two minutes. Do five minutes worth
of warm-up and your body's going to thank you. If you got value from this
video if you wouldn't mind give it a little thumbs up. Hey you put it down in the
comments below. Tell me what you do to get your body warm and ready to play
pickleball because together we can
Train Smart, Live Bold, Age Well