Before I get into today’s post, can I just say that I am freaking sore from the first two days of the Metconmonster!  It’s amazing how even though you can be consistent with your workouts, just changing things up a little bit can have such a different training effect.  This is why I do these challenges, the body needs change and adaptation to keep it progressing.

My soreness is the inspiration for what I’m sharing with you today, a different way to warm up for your workouts!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of dynamic warmups and do use those a majority of the time with my clients, but sometimes you just need to give your body some love.  That’s what inspired me to start doing at least a 5 minute flow of exercises before every workout recently and that’s what I’m showing you today!

The idea is to flow through different exercises and let your body tell you what to do.  This could be done standing, supine, quadruped, it really doesn’t matter.  Simply pick an exercise to start with and let your imagination go from there.

Today my lats, glutes and hips were super sore and were begging for a gradual warmup before jumping into today’s workout.  So I started with some Cat and Cows and then just let the tight and sore spots tell me where to go.

I tend to return to variations of downward facing dog and childs pose throughout the sequence and use those pauses as a place to take deep breaths.  There is no wrong way to do this, be creative and if all else fails have a default exercise you always come back to.

This particular flow included elbow down dogs, traditional ones, rocking on my feet, pigeon stretches for the hip, t-spine reach backs, 1/2 kneeling hips stretches, torso rotations and a modified windmill.

Follow along with the video to try it out (although remember that I did speed it up a little bit so you don’t have to go that fast!)

This is all of course made even better with a cute puppy close by 🙂

Cheers!

-S