Dynamic Warm-up DrillsThe Truth About Warming up for Practice and CompetitionsHey, this is Latif Thomas with complete speed training.com. I hope you're having a great day today. I'm talking today from my couch believe it or not. This is not where I planned on filming this final video but I'm gonna explain it in just a minute why that is. What I want to talk to you today is a little bit ironic because I'm safe from my last video the very first thing your athlete should be focusing on in any practice or competition is that is a fully dynamic warm up. Dynamic warm up is really a critical piece to the overall training puzzle because it's the first thing we do in the beginning of practice and therefore it sets up our ability to avoid injury, to achieve at an optimal level, to stimulate the nervous system. All these things. If we're not doing that with a good warm up, then we're not gonna get the best results out of our athletes and certainly not complete at our highest level. So the days of going out and jogging 400, 800‑meters, a mile and then getting together as a group and doing a stretch well, they're over. That really can't be the crutch of your dynamic warm up. I'm not saying that stretching does not have a role in warming up and improving flexibility and mobility because it does. That's really a topic for another time. Fundamentally that as the foundation of the training where you do that stretching then go off into your different event groups or go off into different position skills that you're going to be doing for that practice, that's not a good enough answer. Dynamic warm up is really important part of training and it has to be a part of your training and there are a few fundamentals that you should know.
The first thing really is that everything has to progress from simple to complex from slow to fast. We want to build athletes up. Get them prepared to compete and train at their highest level. We can't just start going gang busters right off the bat. We have to build into it. Start with some easy stuff and progress to the more complex stuff latter. It's not rocket science. It's just really a matter of common sense but the important thing is you have a big inventory of drills you can pull from. That's the important thing that we have to understand because athletes get bored so I like to make sure I'm changing it up every three or four weeks. That's requires a different inventory of drills. The reason I'm talking to you from the couch today is because I'm right around that three or four week point and I have to switch up my warm up. Even though in a complete speed training program, I clip that whole‑ did all the videos even performed all the dynamic warm up drills, I still can't remember off the top of my head all the drills that are in there. So I'm here actually here sitting here with a notebook writing down the new drills I want to do ‑ add to the warm up to make sure that things don't get steal and athletes don't get bored. I thought it was a little bit ironic that even though I created the program I continue to go back and reference it so I sat back and started doing that, I said let me film this video because I really needed to stress the importance of making sure you have a good inventory of drills and you're doing a lot of different drills and hitting a lot of different ranges of motion. Plains of movements that your athletes are gonna see in their competition because if your athletes are doing a good dynamic warm up, not only are they not gonna compete at a high level but they're gonna increase their likelihood of injury. For me growing up I never did a dynamic warm audiotape from age six when I started training or practicing or playing sports I should say all the way through high school. It wasn't until my first day of college when I got to college and my coach told me to warm up and I jogged a lap and started stretching then sort of sat there and he looked at me like I had three heads and told me I was completely unprepared for being a college athlete. That was my induction into college athletics but that's another story for another time as well. The important thing is you have to put your athletes in a position to succeed and that comes with a good dynamic warm up. What I want to do now is jump to some pieces of the complete speed training program. Some of the various exercises and drills that I'm reviewing here today and I want you to see how I go about progressing some of the drills that we use and give you a little bit more information about dynamic warm up that you can take to your practice and competition starting today and when you start putting these into your practice, you start using these with your athletes, from all the benefits you get just from being able to do assessments with these drills as kids are going through to see where their weaknesses are, coordination issues, injuries that kids are hiding because we know kids like to hide things like that. It's just really important that you use this and if you're not doing this, all the stuff I talked about beforehand really can't be maximized because this sets all of that stuff up and sets up the athletes ability to perform all those other movements and drills and other skills that I talked about earlier. Let's take a look at complete speed training program so you can get idea of how to progress your dynamic warm up. Take some of these drills and exercise them to your next practice and competition and see greater results. So looking here is an example from complete speed training just some basic Luse skip. First thing we do with athletes and again it might be skipping a little bit on your computer because we had to slow things down so everybody could view the video but again get the shoulders and arms loosened up. Just nice loose skipping. No one's gonna get hurt. It's starting to increase the blood flow and do all the things I talked about a few minutes ago. Again, nice easy skips. Now we're going laterally so we're working on different plains of motion by doing these things we're slowing just going slow to fast, simple to complex. These are the things we're doing to warm up. Knee to chest. Loosening up the hip flexors. This is my favorite warm up exercise to do early. I had chronic hamstring problems for a number of reasons I'll get into later. This is a great active movement to get the hamstrings going. I love this exercise.
I think it's great for getting people warmed up and these are the kind of things we should be doing in our warm up to get athletes prepared not only to stay injury free but also to compete at their highest level. The fundamentals of a good warm up are the use of a variety of exercise. I covered a couple right here and I'll show you a couple more but you really want to make athletes have a variety of exercises and move in a variety of plains of motions. Another thing is please change them up every three to four weeks. Just like the strength training program your body whether adapt. Athletes get bored of doing the same thing over and over and start to complain. When they start to do that, they're gonna start to get lazy and sort of half ass their workout. Now, once we've warm add up and we're done some of the other exercises we've talked about a minute ago, we can do more things like the A skip. The A skip is great like the step over drive down. Component of the speed development where we're really firing the gluts and getting the foot to land as you can see here. My foot's landing right underneath my hips every time. This is a great drill. It's complicated for athletes to do you'll see as you learn how to do it. Something more complex. The A run is building off of the A skip making sure that our feet are underneath our hips. We're not reaching or slapping our foot out in front of us. This is a fairly complex exercise because we've warmed up to it, we can start moving and doing these more complex exercises and drills and going to simulate the ranging of motions that we're going to when we're running. Backwards runner is another run I like to do as a lead in because it lets athletes get a little momentum. With a backwards run you can see here I'm recovering that heel underneath my hips and driving the heel back out behind me. Most athletes don't do this. They just sort of stick and kick their leg back behind them. That's not a proper backwards run. It's not gonna get the athlete warmed up and go through all their ranges of motion and get all their muscles activated that they need when they go through and do these things because again we're trying to warm up. High knee is another great one. Popping that knee making sure athletes lead with the knee and not with the ankle which is very common. Making sure that we're trying to keep our hips square. Drive the knee up and again work on coordination but you can't get athletes to do these motions and do these activities if they haven't started with simple basic exercises so when you start to add all these different things into a nice logical common sense progression, you're gonna see great results and athletes are gonna be fully prepared and ready to go for practice and in games.
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