How To Warm Up Before Every Run
Warming up before heading out of the door is a sure-fire way to not only reduce your risk of injury, but to activate those key muscles that will help to improve and better every run. We teamed up with Head Coach and Founder of Passa, Lillie Bleasdale to gain valuable insight into her go-to warm up exercises.
Sometimes we can be itching to get out of the door and get running as soon as we can and often we don’t consider warming up our muscles before getting started. Particularly before those higher intensity sessions, activating some of the key muscle groups can really help improve those runs.
For the most part, warming-up doesn’t need to take a huge amount of time and Lillie has given us her top 5 warm-up exercises that you can complete in less than 5 minutes. That’s got to be worth it?!
Watch the video below as Lillie takes us through each exercise and explains the benefits of adding these to your run routine.
Whilst we mainly use the sagittal plane - think forwards and backward - for running, it's also really important we work our frontal plane - side to side - in order to ensure the stability of our form. Abductor raises are a great way to warm up the muscle which forms part of your outer glute.
2. Walking lunges
Working your quads, hamstrings, and core, walking lunges are a great way to warm up the lower body whilst imitating the upper body swing which occurs during running. By warming the core, we ensure it's more activated before heading out meaning less energy wastage on your run and more energy for the legs.
3. Spiderman lunges
Opening up your groin, lower back, hamstrings, and hip flexors, spiderman lunges are a great way to ease off any lower body tightness before heading out on your run - especially if you've been sat at that desk all day.
4. Walking knee hugs
Working your glutes and hamstrings, walking knee hugs are a great drill to work through pre-run to help improve your hip mobility. This is also a fantastic exercise for females as well, as we tend to have a tighter hip and pelvic area.
5. High Knees
Finally, our most run focussed drill - high knees. High knees help us to focus on our lower body drive which we can take forward into our run. A key thing to remember is to focus on powering downwards, rather than pulling upwards with the legs. This helps you to power off those toes and fire up your fast-twitch fibers. These are especially great before a speed or track session.
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