How to Warm Up and Stretch When Doing a Workout

If you’re in your twenties then you might get away with not doing a proper warm up before your workout or stretching after it…

If, however, you’re over 35 then you probably won’t, which is why we recommend starting any gym session with a comprehensive, full-body warm up and finishing it with static stretching of the muscles that you worked. The key points to bear in mind here are:

Before a Workout – Focus on Movement

Here, you’re looking to increase the heart rate and get the blood pumping quicker, warm up the muscles and activate the joints.
You do this by performing mobility exercises as well as light cardio.
What you don’t want to do here is perform static or held stretches. Save those for afterwards as they won’t bring any benefit until then.

After a Workout – Slow Things Down

It’s here that you perform static stretches, which help return the muscles to their pre-workout state, as well as being useful in improving their general range of movement. There’s not much value in performing mobility exercises here, either.
If you’ve performed a high-intensity workout, such as a HITT session, then you may want to carry out what’s called a pulse-lowering exercise before stretching, in order to bring your heart rate back down to its normal level. This can be something like five minutes on a rowing machine where you feel you’re working at a 5/10 level of exertion.

Here are our videos that cover what to do before and after a workout. There’s a mobility warm up for beforehand and two static stretching routines for afterwards.

Safety: as with everything on this site, this article is subject to our disclaimer; if you have any joint, muscle or mobility issues then check with your doctor or physiotherapist before carrying out these routines.

Mobility Warm Up

So, what’s the best way to carry out a mobility routine? Well, we usually recommend going from head to toe, because if you warm up everything in that order then you’re less likely to miss anything out. What follows is a basic mobility warm up that works all the major joints; as you get more experienced you’ll undoubtedly find other moves that work for you, or particular areas you want to spend more time on, but this is a good place to start.

As the purpose of mobility is to warm up the joints you should work within your natural range of motion rather than trying to go beyond it; all of these moves should be performed carefully and under control, and you should not be pushing to a point of discomfort or pain.

This ends with some bodyweight exercises that increase the heart rate, but you can also spend a few minutes on a cross-trainer or treadmill if you want to increase the heart rate further.

Once you’ve warmed up all the major joints you can carry out the main section of your workout, and after that you’ll move on to…

Post-Workout Stretching

As we said earlier, after the workout is when you should do static, or held stretches. You’ll probably want to focus on the muscles you’ve worked, and these two videos are split into upper body and lower body; if you’ve done a full-body workout then you may want to do them both.

Whilst these stretches are normally held for around 15 seconds, you can hold them for longer than that if they’re in areas where you have particular tightness or are trying to increase your range of motion.

So there we are! All of the above should have helped you to ensure your workout was safer as well as contributing to your recovery before you do your next session.