If you haven’t already started incorporating dynamic movement exercises into your fitness routine, you should. Personally, I love dynamic movement exercises. As my husband puts it, “why wouldn’t I do biceps curls while doing squats?” If you only have twenty minutes a few times a week, you can cram a lot of exercise into one concentrated, full body workout. And considering that studies show that you can actually produce strength gains in a muscle by bringing it to fatigue once a week, you can still make progress in your fitness even if you’re extremely busy. Now, that is only for strength gains, you still need cardiovascular exercise, but even if you can only fit one workout in a week, you can still make progress. And if you also incorporate extra cardiovascular exercise throughout your day (park as far away from the doors and walk briskly, take the long way to the bathroom, take the stairs, etc.,) then it’s really all you need to maintain health. You’re not going to be Ironman or anything, but you’ll at least get in the minimum you need to be healthy.
You can see this post here for some exercises and different websites with some great online routines you can follow, which makes it incredibly easy to fit in no matter how busy you are.
What I want to focus on in this article isn’t dynamic movement as an actual exercise routine, but the benefits of incorporating dynamic movements into your warm-up routine - assuming you’re doing more than one 20 minute workout a week. Maybe you play softball or soccer in the summer and you want some tips on how to prevent injury. Dynamic warm ups are one, research-backed way, to help prevent injury while exercising.
Dynamic warm ups are basically a fancy new term for ‘active range of motion exercises’. You take the joint through its range of motion, increasing the range as the tissue warms up to its full range. This helps to not only warm up the muscles, joint capsules, ligaments, fascia, etc., which has been shown to reduce sports-related injuries, but it also helps to warm up your nervous system for coordinated movement, increasing proprioception and balance so that when you are engaged in activity, you have quicker response times, which can also help to prevent injury.
It’s important to remember to start slow and not get into full range of motion movements until muscles are nice and warm.
This site gives a really great overview, and you can watch some videos here.
Til next time, folks!