If I told you that by using the information in this video for five minutes
before you started to play would make you a better pickleball player.
Would you do it?
[inaudible]
Hey everybody, it's CJ Johnson.
Becoming your best and reaching your potential as a pickleball player when
you're over 50 requires that you do things differently and that's what this
channel is all about. So if you haven't already hit the subscribe,
hit that and then the bell notification, so you know when I post a new video.
How many times do you arrive at the court, hit a couple of dinks,
maybe a groundstroke or two, and before you know it, you're in a game.
I can hear what you're saying already. You're thinking, Hey CJ,
that's how I warm up. But the fact of the matter is our bodies are changing,
we're losing our flexibility,
we're losing our balance and we also need to focus our mind.
The five minutes before you play are critical to helping you play better
pickleball.
Today I'm going to give you a dynamic stretching routine that'll take you just a
few minutes and get both your mind and your body ready to play.
Make sure you stick around to the end of this video.
I've got a free PDF for you so that you can print it off and take it to the
courts so you'll be ready to play each and every time.
Before we start a stretching routine,
we want to make sure that our body is warm.
Stretching cold muscles can lead to injury.
So take a couple laps around the court, or do a few of my favorite exercises.
One of the things I like to do are side shuffles.
When we do this we want to make sure that we're nice and low.
That we're bent from our knees. I see a lot of people do this,
stand real tall and that's
a recipe for disaster,. You can easily trip and fall doing that.
So as you do these side shuffles, bend from the knees. Chin is up.
Eyes are straight ahead. That's where we'd be looking when we play pickleball.
Here's another fun one to get both of your feet as well as your brain moving.
We're going to start here with a line right underneath me.
I'm going to step over with my right. Then my left, right, left.
So I'm going right, left, right, left.
As I get comfortable with this pick up the pace.
What you'll notice is I always want to have this line directly beneath me.
Most people start doing this and get way forward.
That position is not very balanced. Once you do it with the right foot,
than let's move to the left foot, left, right, left, right. Again,
pick up the pace.
If you want a real challenge change in mid step.
We're looking forward, head is up, eyes are up.
Once you started huffing and puffing, now you're to stretch.
Let's warm up the upper body. I want to start with some arm circles,
so we're going to bring it in front of our face.
Then we're going to reach in front and all the way back,
so in front of my body when I go down all the way back and think about tracing a
large circle with your fingers.
I'm going to stand to the side so you can see this motion.
So I go in front of my body and then I reach back. In front and
reach back.
You want to do about 10 to 15 of these on each side of the body.
Another good one to start to stretch out our upper body and our chest is to bend
over. You can keep your knees flexed, bend over, touch the ground,
look down at the ground,
and now lift one arm to the sky and allow your head to rotate.
That
opens up your chest and is starting to open up the arms and the shoulders as
well. Again, 10 to 15 on each side.
Let's get into that shoulder just a little bit deeper. Take your arm,
bend it in a 90 degree angle, bring it right in front of you.
And now keeping it bent
arm in towards your body with your other arm and out in and out.
Let's loosen up the triceps in the arm. Take the arms,
your palms facing away from you. Bring them up overhead,
drop them back and swing them down up. Swing them down. Up,
touch and swing them down. So you can see here we're reaching nice and high
and swinging down.
A good one for our wrists and our arms.
I like to rotate at the elbows first.
And then rotate packing the other direction.
Now let's do the same thing with the wrist making big circles feel like your
fingers are touching edge of the circle.
Now that we have our upper body warm and loosened up,
let's start to loosen up our torso. So what I want to do is I want to keep,
at first, my hips are going to be facing straight away.
And I'm just going to let gravity take my upper body around.
Now as I start to feel a little bit more loose,
I can allow my toe to come up and allow my head to follow my arms all the way
around. It's a nice stretch into the torso.
Okay, let's start to get our lower bodies loosened up.
One that I like is a hip circle so you can stand on one foot.
If you need balance, you can hold onto a net.
But all I want to do here is just take my foot out and around and make nice big
circle with them. You can put your foot down in between if you need to.
Do one leg and then do the other. Here's another good one.
Most places have a fence.
I can start by doing some light squats up and down,
just simply holding onto the fence. If you don't have a fence,
you can do this. Holding on to a pickleball net.
But up and down, starting to loosen up the hips
and the glutes. Another one.
Hold onto this fence again and we can kick the leg forward and backward and we
can turn this into a little quad stretch. What I'm doing when I'm here,
is as I kick the leg backward.
I allow the heel to touch my butt.
That's going to help you to loosen up the quad.
Another one of my favorites to get our hamstrings going would be a butt kicker.
So I'm just going to stand here and I'm going to kick the heels to the butt.
If you really want to light up those hamstrings,
do a double on each side,
focusing on the muscle in the back of the leg
and getting that ready to play. One last one that I like. Again,
you can hold on to a fence if you like,
get your legs a little further than a shoulder width apart and we're going to
lunge from side to side.
This should open up the inside of your thighs in the groin area.
You notice here I'm standing very tall, not bent forward in this position,
side to side.
I can't believe I almost forgot about calves.
It's important to give them a stretch as well because they're our major source
of injury in pickleball. So you can use a fence and or a bench,
anything at the pickleball court, lean against it.
You want to have your back straight.
You don't want to have your behind sticking out.
You're going to lean against this fence and then you're simply going to rock to
the ball of your foot.
Let's pick one toe up in the air and then the other toe up in the air go side to
side.
You can do this with your feet facing forward and then tilt your toes out just a
little bit as well as in and that gets a different muscle inside of the calf.
Here's that free PDF that I promised, Print it off,
and you can take this routine to the courts with you.
If you're like me and you get bored,
here's another five minute dynamic stretching warm-up.
If you got value from this video.
Make sure that you give it a thumbs up and share it with your pickleball playing
friends because. Together we can Train Smart, Live Bold and Age Well.