As the founder of a popular movement website called www.Kabuki.MS I feel it’s my duty to tell you that I want you to limit the amount of exercise prep that you perform. Yes, I said limit your exercise prep, not do more. In recent years I’ve seen a trend for mobility, movement priming, and other means of exercise preparation. While this trend is very positive over the just ‘grind through the pain’ mentality of the past, by many it has been taken too far. Just like anything else people seem to jump right to the “if a little bit is great, then more must be better” approach.If you are doing 45min of prep work and 30min of training, then you're doing something wrong! In fact your preparation work should not exceed 10min. Keep it to 9min or less of preparation work prior to training! We call this the #SMEP approach or Single Minute Exercise Prep. So why isn’t more better? Simply put, it just isn't adding value and is actually taking away from the time you could be spending training. Training provides a stress response and thus adaptation. In the lifting world we call this GAINS. Yes, DEM GAINS are what we are looking for, and the cumulative effect over time yields improvement in performance. Improved performance is the reason we are in the gym or on the athletic field to begin with. And if you are training well, the movements done in training will not have the negative effect on the body, or even be the actual “prep work” in your warm-up. This leads us to our first key point.KEY POINT: Evaluate your training and movement- If you need to do tons of prep or recovery work in excess of 9min just to be able to train…. You might want to look at your training or your quality of movement.Once you...
