What Are The Benefits of Bodyweight Warm Up Exercises

Extremely Effective Warm Up Exercises

The goal of the warm up is to both prevent injury and improve performance through preparing the body to perform physical tasks. They allow us to move periodically towards more challenging exercises transitioning us from unprepared to train to being prepared to perform challenging tasks. These goals are easily achieved using bodyweight exercises, in fact the majority of exercises in our warm up library are actually bodyweight exercises. This is because using the bodyweight is an extremely effective way to warm up the body.

Performed At Home

Bodyweight exercises can easily be added to your home training sessions, as long as you have a yoga / training mat or you feel comfortable doing them on the floor then you are good to get moving. Often times it is not that there are not enough exercises for warm ups, it is just there is a lack of knowledge of all the different exercises available to us to warm up. Using our movement library will help you a great deal when designing your warm ups.

Accessible to All Abilities

Bodyweight doesn’t mean easy exercises and it doesn’t mean hard exercise, bodyweight exercises can be very easy and they can be very hard. This means that individuals of all different capabilities can use bodyweight exercises at home to warm up correctly. This is from professional athletes to true beginners, making them accessible to everyone.

How To Design A Bodyweight Warm Up

Designing a warm up will always depend on the individual that is warming up, but for the sake of this article I will just provide a warm up for an intermediate individual who knows how to perform most of the movement patterns in resistance training.

When designing a warm up the first step is to review the session that is about to be performed, once we know the session design we can then design the warm up. The session design will tell us the primary exercises within the session? These are the movements we will prioritise during the warm up. For the sake of this example the first exercise is a Goblet Squat and the second exercise is a press up in the body of the training session. We can now pick a warm up exercise for the goblet squat and for the press up. I like the third exercise in my warm ups to be a core exercise as they are very effective at raising body temperature. A sample warm up designed for this session is below. Using this rational is an effective way to warm up and the warm ups rarely take longer than five minutes.

Try These 12 Body Weight Warm Up Exercises You Can Perform At Home