Make sure you’re warming up before your workout

When it’s cold outside, its more important to spend time warming up your muscles and preparing for exercise.

What is the purpose of warming up?

The purpose of a warm up is to prepare the body for exercise-an active warm up is best, using your own body to produce heat. This is beneficial to increase your heart rate, increase blood flow and the temperature of your muscles and most importantly to reduce the risk of an injury.

Start off by mobilising your joints:

• 10 shoulder rolls-forward and back
• 10 side bends
• 10 hip circles
• 10 knee raises
• 10 ankle and wrist movements (up and down).

Pulse raiser:

This is the main part of your warm up and you should spend between 5 and 15minutes warming up depending on the intensity of your workout. You can use any cardio machine for your warm up for example the treadmill, cross-trainer, bike…

Prep stretches:

Once you are warm you can perform a few stretches to make sure your muscles are ready for exercise;
Calf stretch, hamstring stretch, quad stretch, upper backstretch, chest stretch, tricep stretch-these only need to be held for about 15 seconds.

Now you’re ready for your work out!

By Kirsty Kemp, Fitness Instructor at Reynolds Fitness Spa Rainham