Warming Up For Taido

A while back, I ran a poll about warm up meth­ods and promised a follow-up arti­cle. You are now read­ing the follow-up article.

I think most peo­ple are vaguely aware of the impor­tance of warm­ing up prior to engag­ing in demand­ing phys­i­cal activ­i­ties. Properly warm­ing up pre­pares the body to oper­ate beyond its usual ranges — and push­ing beyond our com­fort zones is nec­es­sary in order to improve our skills. Taido being an espe­cially dynamic (and some­times gym­nas­tic) mar­tial art, we need to make sure that our bod­ies are ready to han­dle our jumps, twists, and slides.

I’m not going to worry too much about con­vinc­ing you of the impor­tance of warm­ing up, because I think it’s pretty obvi­ous. Most Taido prac­tices include some sort of warm-up, and almost any­thing is cer­tainly bet­ter than noth­ing. However, I want to dis­cus var­i­ous meth­ods for warm­ing up and give some sug­ges­tions for warm-ups specif­i­cally geared for Taido students.

Begin with the End in Mind

Before I start list­ing my rec­om­men­da­tions, I want to take a sec­ond to out­line what I believe a warm-up rou­tine should accom­plish. Without hav­ing a clear goal, it’s dif­fi­cult to be sure that we have achieved it. Unfortunately, I get the idea that many stu­dents don’t know exactly what they should be get­ting out of a warm-up. I say this because, in the few moments after the group warm-up in most classes I watch, stu­dents tend to stand around instead of con­tin­u­ing to pre­pare. You can never be too prepared.

So what is achieved by a good warm-up? In essence, the result of a good warm-up is that the body and mind are ready for action. The mus­cles are warm, loose, and fueled. The joints are lubri­cated and mobile through­out their ranges of motion. The ner­vous sys­tem is aroused and tuned. The mind is clear and present.

I can think of sev­eral indi­ca­tors of body/mind action-readiness: an ele­vated pulse (but not “pound­ing”); full, deep breath (not pant­ing or gasp­ing); just begin­ning to sweat; no pain/stiffness in joints or mus­cles; not think­ing about work; col­ors appear bright, sounds are crisp and sharp. There are of course lots of other ways to tell that you are warmed-up, but these are the basic sen­sa­tions of train­ing preparedness.

I won’t get into the neu­ro­phys­i­ol­ogy of warm­ing up because it’s not really rel­e­vant here. Suffice it to say for now that the above guides address all of the impor­tant require­ments for acti­vat­ing our best per­for­mances. Nutrition, rest, con­di­tion­ing, and over­all health also play a role, but these fac­tors are beyond the scope of what we can hope to com­pen­sate for in a warm-up session.

Common Warm-up Errors

I want to start out by men­tion­ing a few bad habits that tend to show up in warm-ups for mar­tial arts prac­tices. These points are not a cri­tique of any par­tic­u­lar rou­tine, but cover var­i­ous warm-ups I’ve seen in var­i­ous dojo, printed in books and mag­a­zines, or posted online. Most of these rou­tines are not nec­es­sar­ily bad, but they tend to be lack­ing in one aspect or another. Here are a few com­mon mis­takes as they come off the top of my head:

Excessive Static Stretching

This is the big­gie. Most mar­tial arts warm-ups I’ve wit­nessed include sta­tic stretches. As the name implies, sta­tic stretches are any stretch­ing exer­cises in which the body is held in one posi­tion for a period of time. An exam­ple of a sta­tic stretch rou­tine would be the stan­dard “sit down on the floor and touch your toes,” etc. we have tra­di­tion­ally done in American Taido.

These kinds of stretches are not bad in and of them­selves, but they are con­traindi­cated for warm­ing up. For one thing, our mus­cles can­not stretch to their max­i­mum until they are totally warm (and until the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem is fully acti­vated — the expla­na­tion of this can be really com­pli­cated, but just take my word for it for now). In many warm-up rou­tines, stretches are pre­ceded by only a few min­utes of jog­ging and cal­is­then­ics — this is not nearly enough time to pre­pare the mus­cles for sta­tic stretching.

For another thing, stud­ies show that sta­tic stretches tem­porar­ily reduce the elas­tic­ity of the mus­cles. This is a bad thing because, when we kick and move, we need our mus­cles to grad­u­ally slow as they reach the ends of their ranges. Otherwise, we risk pulling mus­cles and tear­ing lig­a­ture. Several stud­ies have shown that there is a higher inci­dence of strains and sprains for ath­letes who per­formed sta­tic stretches in their warm-ups.

In the past, it was believed that any stretch­ing was bet­ter than none, but now we have evi­dence sug­gest­ing that what stretches we do and when we do them has an impact on our health and per­for­mance. Though our warm-up sta­tic stretch­ing is a tra­di­tion, it is poten­tially dan­ger­ous. Let’s please drop them from our warm-ups.

So when should we do sta­tic stretches? At the end of our prac­tice, when our mus­cles are as warm and loose as they are ever going to be, and after we have fin­ished mov­ing them quickly at extreme ranges.

Not Enough Dynamic Stretching

Even though sta­tic stretches are best reserved for cool-down, we should include some stretch­ing in our warm-ups. Specifically, we should do more dynamic stretching.

Dynamic stretches are stretches in which the mus­cles being stretched are in con­tin­u­ous motion. Examples are swing kicks, body twists, arm swings, and other move­ments that quickly stretch and release the muscles.

Dynamic stretch­ing is a per­fect match to the dynamic move­ments required for kick­ing, jump­ing, twist­ing, turn­ing, etc. That are part of Taido tech­niques. It makes good sense to pre­pare the body for action by sim­u­lat­ing the action you plan to per­form. Performing dynamic stretch­ing prior to a Taido prac­tice is akin to slowly turn­ing up the heat on a pot in which you cook a live lobster.

When per­form­ing dynamic stretches as part of a a warm-up, it’s impor­tant to keep things gen­tle and relaxed. Don’t start out swing­ing with full speed and power. Gradually build up to max­i­mal relaxed range of motion over sev­eral sets of a few rep­e­ti­tions. This slowly relaxes the mus­cles and helps to “tune” the nerves that con­trol the mus­cles’ con­trac­tion and relaxation.

By replac­ing the stan­dard sta­tic stretches with dynamic stretches, we can expect to improve our flex­i­bil­ity and reduce injuries like pulled muscles.

Doing Too Much

Sometimes, instruc­tors get the idea in their heads to start off classes with a tough work­out to get every­one “really warmed up.” This is gen­er­ally not a great idea. The pur­pose of a warm-up is not to make every­one tired, but to pre­pare them to per­form at their best. Doing too much in a warm-up pre­pares stu­dents to be too tired to prac­tice well.

There are sev­eral ways to do too much in a warm-up, but the two most pop­u­lar are to include a lot of strength exer­cises or endurance work in a warm-up. I’ve even seen instruc­tors sub­ject their stu­dents to long sets of fast tech­niques as a warm-up and call it “car­dio.” There are two rea­sons why this kind of stuff does more harm than good.

One rea­son is that we learn only what we prac­tice. I learned as a child that half-assed prac­tice made me very good at doing half-assed tech­niques. By the same token, prac­tic­ing when we are already tired teaches to per­form tech­niques as if we were tired. When our bod­ies are fatigued, we can’t move at full speed or power. Fatigue also causes the ner­vous sys­tem to be less effi­cient, which reduces our reac­tion time, bal­ance, and over­all coordination/agility.

The other rea­son not to wear your­self out in a warm-up is that dif­fer­ent types of prac­tice (for exam­ple, strength, endurance, and tech­ni­cal) require dif­fer­ent types of mus­cle recruit­ment and ner­vous activ­ity. In gen­eral, it’s best to do the most complicated/technical prac­tices ear­lier in a work­out. This is because the ner­vous sys­tem loses effi­ciency as we become fatigued. Technique/form prac­tice requires a high degree of coor­di­na­tion, focus, and ner­vous con­trol. As a result, we can per­form this kind of prac­tice bet­ter when we are fresh.

After tech­ni­cal drills, the next log­i­cal step is strength train­ing. This requires less con­trol from the ner­vous sys­tem, but still uses a lot of energy in the mus­cles. Typically, endurance work should be per­formed last, because the pri­mary goal in such prac­tice is to keep going — form and power are not as important.

All three types of prac­tice work best when they fol­low a good warm-up. In a ses­sion that includes all three, the best sequence would move from warm-up to tech­ni­cal prac­tice, strength train­ing, and endurance train­ing, fol­lowed by a cool-down and stretching.

In any event, the pur­pose of the warm-up is to pre­pare us for prac­tice, not to make us too tired to prac­tice well.

Not Enough Joint Focus

Mobility is not solely con­cerned with our mus­cles; it also requires the joints to be able to move freely. Specifically, we need to make sure that our full ranges of motion are avail­able to us at any given time. For exam­ple, in a typ­i­cal day, most Americans move their knee and hip joints through only a frac­tion of their pos­si­ble ranges — for­wards and back­wards. However, Taido’s move­ments require knee and hip move­ments through all three planes.

In order to ade­quately pre­pare our joints for Taido move­ments, we should try to move each joint through it’s entire range of motion. This loosens up the joint a bit and also helps to lubri­cate the joint cap­sule by redis­trib­ut­ing the syn­ovial fluid more evenly. This increases mobil­ity and decreases joint pain — both very good things.

Knee, ankle, and hip injuries are epi­demic in the mar­tial arts; almost every­one who prac­tices a mar­tial art for any num­ber of years tends to develop them. Performing motions that may help to pre­vent these injuries as part of our reg­u­lar warm-ups should be the rule rather than the exception.

Going Through the Motions

One draw­back of using a set rou­tine for warm-ups is that it’s really bor­ing. People mem­o­rize a set of move­ments and do them half-assed with­out pay­ing the least atten­tion to what they are doing.

Warming up is not only for get­ting your body ready, but a chance to pre­pare the mind. Focus on each body part as you move it around and be on the look­out for any pains or stiff­ness which may indi­cate an injury you need to take account of dur­ing your prac­tice ses­sion. This is also a good time to remind your­self of your train­ing goals for the ses­sion (hint: if you don’t have a goal each ses­sion, you are mur­der­ing your poten­tial for improve­ment — even if your goal is sim­ply to mem­o­rize a new rou­tine or make it through class with­out wheez­ing, you will see more results if you have a clear goal for each practice).

Don’t waste time by warm­ing up the body while leav­ing your mind some­place else. Since the mind con­trols the body, you owe it to your­self to bring your brain into your warm-up rou­tine by at least being delib­er­ate and con­scious of what your body is doing.

Prescriptions For Taido Warm-Ups

Now that I’ve writ­ten about a few prob­lems and explained pos­si­ble solu­tions, I’ll recap my thoughts on the ingre­di­ents for a qual­ity warm-up.

• Engage the Brain
• Engage the Nervous System
• Engage the Breath
• Engage the Muscles
• Engage the Joints

If you’ve done all these things, you should feel aware, loose, and happy — not tired, stiff, or anx­ious. Even bet­ter than the plea­sur­able and pos­i­tive feel­ing of being well warmed-up, all of your body-systems will be ready to per­form at their opti­mum lev­els, and you’ll be able to push your­self to improve.