Start Your January Strong – Week One

Welcome to Week One!

Week One: What You Need to Do Before You Run

This week’s videos focus on key movements and stretches that should be done before each run, from warming up and engaging your core correctly, to some mobility and stretching. All little things that you may not think were important, but if done right, make a huge difference to your running, and more importantly, help prevent injury.

An Introduction to the Week

Day One: Warm-up Before Your Run

Why should we warm up before we run?

For runners, the emphasis has traditionally been on injury-prevention, but more and more, we are now beginning to understand the true benefits of how a warm-up is actually about improving your performance.

Performing a proper warm-up gradually increases our body temperature, heart rate and blood flow to the working muscles, and may even contribute to reduced muscle soreness before beginning your actual session or race – essentially enhancing performance.

In this video we focus on dynamic movements to warm up the whole body. We start with movements to wake up the muscles, warming up around your joints to improve range of movement, and then steadily increasing to pulse-raisers, to make sure the body is warm and the blood and oxygen is pumping to your muscles.

This warm-up can be done in your house, on the driveway or on the road before you get running.

Day Two: Workout Before You Run

You’ve probably heard it a hundred times before: A strong core is the foundation of every great runner’s performance. That’s because a strong core can improve your posture and speed, because the strength in your limbs is tied to the strength in your torso. A strong core is a solid foundation for strength in the rest of the body.

Day Three: Mobility and Stretch Before your Run

This video’s primary focus is on how to engage your core, not by doing millions of sit-ups, but by focusing on the mind to muscle connection. This connection is about learning to contract your muscle on demand and is extremely important, as it is training the muscles in your core to work in harmony, so you will have better balance and stability. Contracting your trunk muscles provides support for your spine and pelvis in static positions, and during dynamic movements.

A good mobility and stretching session helps compensate for running-specific stresses on your muscles and reduces the risk of overuse, muscular imbalances and Injuries. Stretching also helps reduce post-run soreness and can accelerate recovery time.

In this video, we therefore focus on mobility and active/dynamic stretching to balance muscle strength between the muscle actively performing a movement and its counterpart, hydrated fascia tissue, and building enough strength to get into a stretch and stay there.