Warm Up Properly With Zack Esposito
Warming up is literally nobody's favorite part of a workout, training session, or competition, it probably doesn’t even break the top 10. There might be people out there that actually enjoy the process of making weight more than they enjoy the warm up before a competition. At best a warm up is slow, boring, annoying but necessary and at worst a warm up can be slow, nerve wracking, stressful, tiring and anxiety inducing, but necessary. Even though it sucks it is still necessary and athletes can’t afford to just skip out on it.
This is due to a lot of reasons, but even if an athlete does the perfect workout, it still is not going to be a super enjoyable experience. The problem is that a lot of athletes and coaches don’t really know why they warm up or how to do it properly, especially in the case of younger wrestlers. Most athletes and coaches have some idea, but most of the time they just treat it as a mini-workout as a way to get the body ready for the more intense work that’s to come, but this is only one reason why warming up is important.
Warming up should get some sweat on your head, but a lot of coaches treat warm ups as a time to get some conditioning in on their athletes. Not only is this not the ideal way to prepare them for what is to come in training, but it also tires out an athlete mentally and physically, meaning that they aren’t able to put in as much work as they could, and they can learn and process new information and tips as well.
Warm ups should be low intensity, get the body warm and loose, increase muscle and joint activation and help prepare an athlete for the training that they’re about to endure. This means that some sport specific movements and even some light stretching needs to be involved to help prevent injuries and get the body ready and moving as much as possible without fatiguing any of the muscles, so that they are already for training.
In this video, Coach Zack Esposito goes over a warm up he likes to do, that covers everything that we just talked about. This warm up consists of a lot of movements and exercises that you’ve probably seen before and might even be included in warm ups you've done before. The warm up starts off with neck rolls to both the left and to the right, then moving into hula hoops. Then you are going to go into ankle rolls and knees rolls that Esposito calls tootsie rolls.
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After that you’re going to roll onto your back and perform wrestler bridges and then wrestler bridge push-ups. Then you’re going to stand and do some standard jump jacks to finish off. All of these movements do one of three things, that being joint activation to get the muscles and joints working and help prevent injury, help instill some patterns for wrestling and even a little strength training in the case of the wrestling bridge work.
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