I like to think about warming up as preparation.

When I lead a meeting, I start by warming up for it.

I review my agenda. I rehearse some things out loud. I anticipate what questions my teammates will ask me. I make sure that I have my glass of water and that I’ve gone to the bathroom. I prep my tabs in my internet browser to ensure easy access to any asset/doc/task/portal we may talk about. I stick very close to the clock during the few minutes before.

This helps me prepare to have a successful meeting. 

In my yoga practice, I like to use my warm-up time in much the same way.

Yoga is complex. The practice moves us through many shapes and a tremendous range of motion, which is probably why I love it so much. But with great power comes great responsibility. If I want to utilize those ranges of motion safely and sustainably, then I need to use my warm-up time to prepare for the complexity of practice.

Some of my favorite movement teachers compare the yoga practice to a sports game, like let's say, tennis 🎾. If you are a tennis player, you don't train your arm strength on the court. You train your arm strength at the gym, and you express it on the court. This is an important distinction. If you choose to train your arm strength on the court, it may work out, but it may also create imbalances and injuries (you've heard of that pesky tennis elbow, right?). 

Imagine that yoga is similar to tennis. Warrior 2 doesn't help you improve your ankle's mobility--it offers your ankle the opportunity to express the mobility it already has.

Knowing this, what if we used our warm-up time to deliberately train our blind-spots? To train the joint movements we know we're going to do throughout our practice? What if we warm-up in such a way that *we know* our ankles are going to feel bad-a** in Warrior 2?

This is how I like to think about my warm-ups.

Warm-Up Recipe

The recipe for the best warm-up depends on the activity being prepared for and the person doing it.
 

As a former couch potato, my body’s default state is best described as...limp? When I warm-up, it’s my time to get my brain firing up motor commands in my body in the most optimal way.

This is why you'll notice my classes begin with 3 main ingredients.

Key Elements of a Yoga Warm-Up

The following 3 poses are movements I do every single day to encourage optimal brain-body connection and prepare the body for the movements that follow.

BRIDGE POSE - I start with bridge pose first to get my glute muscles (booty muscles) firing. For many of us, our glutes are very sleepy. But they shouldn't be! They are the biggest muscle in the body and are responsible for moving and stabilizing the hips in all six hip positions. If our brain isn't able to turn on the glutes *first* before it starts firing other muscle groups, we are going to be efforting more than we have to and our glutes won't know how to do their job. Get the glutes on first and I've found that everything after that tends to feel more doable and better.

ABS - After the glutes are turned on, I like to transition my attention to the front of the abdomen with ab work that gets every single layer of belly muscle activated. These muscles can also be quite sleepy, and they are responsible for both moving and stabilizing the trunk, so we want access to these puppies early and often.

DOLPHIN - This pose gets the shoulders, chest and upper back online. It turns the body upside down so that the brain can begin to process what it means to be upside down throughout the rest of practice. Yoga involves a ton of weight bearing on the hands and shoulders. Doing this pose in every.single.practice helps to develop our competency with this.

I find that this is the most effective warm-up for me. These three poses are population-friendly and effective at getting our core online for the rest of practice. I consider my warm-up complete when I can arrive in downdog--a weight bearing position on the hands--and feel plugged in.


But remember what I said above--the optimal warm-up depends on the activity being done and the person doing it. 

You and your activity are part of this equation. 

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