posted on August 3, 2022
What’s up, my wicked Wednesdayers!
The time has come to perform a proper warm-up before tossing your weights around. The days of slapping your quads, hitting some arm swings and getting right under the bar are over, you’re probably too old for that anyway.
Now let’s RAMP up your warm-up for your next training session. RAMP is a systematic approach of warming up that promotes the physical, psychological and technical skill of the participant for their immediate and long term wellness development. The acronym RAMP stands for Raise, Activate, Mobilise and Potentiate. Time to break it down.
The Raise phase focuses on raising blood flow, muscle/internal temperature, muscle elasticity and firing up neural activation(mind and movement connection). This is achieved by using low intensity general movements. Some of these general locomotion movements include, jumping rope, jumping jacks,high knees or general gym cardio machines. If you played sports growing up or now, think of the first part of your dynamic warm-up. Take about 5 minutes to get the raise phase going.
During the Activate & Mobilise phase we are working to engage our muscles and mobilise our tissues to improve our range of motion and movement skill that we are going to be using during our training or game. We are still considering the prior phase here as we move from a more general movement pattern to specific.
The Potentiate phase is essentially a rehearsal of gradually increasing “stress” on the body to prepare for your training session or competition. Let’s think build up sprints/jumps or build up sets to your squats or even light and explosive medicine ball slams, throws and exercises.
Here is a quick example of the RAMP warmup for someone who is about to get into a Squat session at the gym.
Raise- 1-3 sets x20 reps of Jumping Rope, Jumping Jacks, High Knees, Forward & Backward Skips, Side to Side Shuffle
Activate- 1-2 sets x 10 reps of Banded Monster Walks,Banded Good Morning, Bodyweight Walking Lunges, Cossack Squats
Mobilize- 1-2sets x 5-10 reps of Squat to Stretch, Inchworms, Spiderman with Rotation, Cat Camel, Glute Bridge to Reach
Potentiate- 1-2sets x 5 reps of Medicine Ball Slams, Medicine Ball Chops, Box Jumps, Lateral Skater Hops, Build-Up Barbell Squats
Try the RAMP warm-up in your next training sessions and If you have any questions about RAMP, just let your Dude know.
Stay Warm,
CeJ
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