help with warm ups

[to_love_a_rose]

Thanks to everyone for their help with my earlier questions. I have yet another plea for help.

For those who lift exclusively at home, and anyone else with advice, how do you handle the warm up/cool down. My book (Weight Training for Dummies) says that you must warm up. I frequently roll out of bed and into pushups (okay, not quite, there's usually some form of caffeinated beverage first), but I can see how warm ups are a good thing, especially if I want to work up to more intense exercises.

However, as I work out at home and have no bike/treadmill/etc for some quick cardio to warm up, I'm not sure how/how much I can warm up. So, what does everyone do for their warm up? Any suggestions for an easy warm up that will do the job without much fuss?

Comments

[ponderosa]

How about a quick walk around the block, or up and down the driveway or stairs? Or if you're not in a second floor apartment like I am, a bit of running in place or jumping jacks to get the blood flowing.

Some of the non-strenuous drills in this video might be good choices and help you stretch/limber up:

http://video.about.com/usmilitary/Army-Exercises--Warm-Up-Drills.htm

[ponderosa]

...and I should say that I typically rely on 7 minutes of brisk walking to warm up. If this is at home, i find a fast tempo song that runs about 4 minutes, walk down the block and when it ends walk on home. I also begin my first sets with something that keeps my heartrate up or raises it even more. For me that's often burpees or alternating pushups/stepups. I personally don't often do more cardio for cool down anymore. I tend to do all my corework (crunches, russian twists) and then slowly cycle through part of a yoga routine to stretch out the muscles I've focused on (child pose, downward facing dog, cobra).

[rydra_wong]

yeloson just wrote an excellent post on warm-ups, why you need them and how they work:

http://yeloson.dreamwidth.org/788108.html

There's also a this good article from the New York Times a few years back on why static stretching before exercise is a bad idea, and dynamic stretching isn't, with some suggested dynamic warm-up moves.

For me: if I'm doing serious weight-lifting, then (having walked to the gym) I'll do several rounds of yoga sun salutations, which covers most body parts. Then I'll make my first set of everything much lighter, doing a warm-up set with minimal weight or just the bar.

If I'm bouldering, then I walk in and have a whole ritual of warming up the shoulder and arm muscles step by step, starting with the shoulder joints and upper back and ending with my fingers. Then the first 15 minutes of climbing is still warm-up, doing stuff of increasing difficulty until I hit my usual level. But that's obviously something that requires a highly-specific warm-up.

[martinemonster]

I like to warm up with a few sets of relatively light exercises in rapid succession. 5x5 of pull-ups, sit-ups, push-ups, squats for example. Or just burpees. They get the job done. ;)