Modern Wisdom - #162 - Dr Sam Spinelli - How To Design Your Perfect Warmup

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Dr Sam Spinelli is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and Strength & Conditioning Expert. The first thing you do before any workout is warm up, but understanding the specifics of how an effective warmup routine is designed is unknown by most of us. Expect to learn the key principles behind designing your warmup routine, which movements bring the greatest returns for upper & lower, how to improve your overhead position, deepen your squat, save time and stay resilient. Do not miss this one. Check out everything I use from The Protein Works and get 35% OFF SITE WIDE with the code MODERN35 - https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ Extra Stuff: Check out Dr Spinelli's Website - https://www.thestrengththerapist.com/ Follow Dr Spinelli on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dr.samspinelli/ Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello humans of podcast land, welcome back. My guest today is Dr. Sam Spinelli and we are talking about how to design the perfect warm up routine. Everybody that exercises has to have some sort of warm up routine and having been an athlete in one form or another for two decades, I still don't have a clue. I didn't have a clue before I spoke to Sam about how to design my warmer protein. So that's what we get today. What are Sam's biggest and best returning movements? How should you design the actual routine itself? What are the principles behind it? How long should it go on for? What are the specific movements you can do for upper, for lower, for squatting, for overhead work? If you're going to do stuff that's

involving some internal or some external rotation, if you've got issues with your hips. This episode is so good. Sam really is a wealth of knowledge. You should definitely check him out on Instagram as well. He's gone awesome Instagram. Obviously, if you're not into training and fitness, this episode might be a little bit dry for you, but thankfully there's 161 other episodes that you can go and tune into. But for now, we're learning how to warm up with Dr. Sam Spinelli. What do you think is more difficult to control the human body or Skype when you're trying to record a podcast? Man, I think I'm going to have the shift towards Skype today. If you asked me before, I would have said a different answer.

Yeah, we have had an absolutely technical nightmare, but we've wrangled it. We're here and we're talking. So I want to talk about warmups today, everyone that's listening, even from the people that don't do sport anymore, and they just did PE in school, they'll have had to do some sort of a warmup. And I don't have a clue really why I should be doing a warmup. I do want at the start of every CrossFit class when I did Thai boxing. I was warming up there. I've got programmed warm-ups from my swim coach. If I do swimming or anything, you know, you warm up to do. I even kind of like cough a little bit before I speak on a podcast. Everything has that like on ramp to begin it, right? But I don't know. Where do we start? Like, why do we warm up?

Why should we do it? No, it's a really important question. And at the end of the day, whenever it comes to any of these activities where we're talking about swimming, talking on a podcast or working out, we always want to try to have the best performance we can. When we have a better performance,

we reduce our injury risk, when we have a better performance, we have better outcomes, they're just the desired outcomes at the end of the day. And warming up, regardless of the activity, is going to help to do that. If you look at pretty much any high level activity, people do this in where they progress in certain ways, and they build up into the activity so that they can then perform at their peak when they're doing

the actual activity. And if you don't have that progression into it, then you're just going to be going from cold to into it. Like you have an increased risk of injury, you are going to have a poor performance. There's just tons of negative outcomes with it. I get it. Where do we start? I'm going to do something.

Let's presume, because there could be a million different warmups and million different sports. But I think if we take something like CrossFit, slash powerlifting, slash a run endurance sort of thing, is the broad spectrum of what we're looking at, where do we start with that? So, when it comes to pretty much any major physical activity, there's going to be a few things that we want to ensure that we get there. Basically, like three buckets that we can think of.

And the first one is going to be that you legitimately need to warm up. You need to actually get physically warm. And there's a lot of reasons behind that. But at the end of the day, when we have an increase in our body temperature, we actually have a faster ability to have metabolism occur. So all of our body reactions occur through metabolism, and they're expedited, so they can happen faster when we're actually physically warm. And there's a lot of chemistry behind that, but for everyone listening, you got to legitimately get warm. This also helps with nerve conduction velocity. So when we're trying to do things that require us to be responsive, reactive, we want to be able to do that quickly and that's going to be dependent upon how physically warm we are.

And so all of these things are very heavily based upon just the simple fact of you have to get physically warmed. That's so fascinating. I didn't even know that. Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why, like, you can look at different events where people relatively don't have to do, like, long endurance activities or anything like that, like a high level 100 meter sprinter, they will spend a very long time warming up

at a very slow gradual rate, so that they get to a very warm state, but they do it where they don't have to like expend a lot of energy to do so. And for most people, it can be as simple as like doing a few minutes of jogging, skipping, rowing, whatever you like, or it can be done through other things

to help to achieve other tasks that we'd want in a warm up. So then when we get into the other characteristics of a good warm up, we're gonna be looking at other things like getting your body physically prepared to go through ranges of motion, they're gonna be going through for the day. So, you know, if we're talking about running, there's not a really crazy excursion

that we have to go through, whereas when we get into things like weight lifting, crossfit, other lifting sports, you're going to be going through huge ranges of motion for a lot of these things. And that's where maybe doing some dynamic warm up exercises can be really beneficial. And that also layers on the added benefit of when you do these dynamic warm up exercises, they also get you physically warm, so they can be really beneficial

for hitting two aspects of it. The third key thing that we want when we do a good warm up is getting physically prepared neurologically for what we're about to go into. This is where you have like the idea of a steady ramp up in whatever activity you're gonna do. So like if you're gonna be snatching, you shouldn't just go from doing some body weight

squats to trying to snatch 135. It's not really a great decision. Whereas practicing the skill aspect, doing some sets, gradually working up and weight, or if you're going to be running, gradually building up an effort that you're going to be running at, and then getting into the actual activity. So essentially those are like the three main buckets of a good warm-up. I like it. It's cool. It seems like getting warm would probably quite easily come as a byproduct of the other two. And I'm going to guess that priming yourself neurologically would

come by potentially drilling movements, empty bar, poly bar, hanging from a rig, perhaps, or hanging from rings, or whatever it might be. That sort of stuff would start to get those neurons firing. Exactly. Those are the things that I would call the essentials. Not necessarily what could go into being the perfect warm-up, but the essentials of what someone would want, not screw things up. I mean, straight off the bat, I have done, and there will be people listening as well.

Lots of times, you go in a gym, maybe it's a bit cold, especially in the UK, right? It's constantly cold. Go into the gym, and you do some stretches, you get the bar out, it's overhead. Maybe you're not doing class, and you just can't, oh, go do my own thing. And you do, you start your work, you can start your workout without sweating. So I mean, is a good, is a good heuristic that there's a couple of beads of sweat floating around how hot, hot? That's, that is actually a great question. And so that gets into a little bit more of like what's the actual activity you're going to do. And also the individual's ability to

sweat. Because there are people that like don't easily sweat. There are some people that, you know, they look at a gym and they start to sweat. That's me. I mean, the second camp and there's a couple of girls in our gym who managed to come in and their faces just look totally flawless when they're finished. Whereas me and some of the guys look like we've been in a fight. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm in that first camp where like, if you see me sweating, it's pretty rare. Yeah. Um, so for a lot of people, it's kind of tricky to go off like that simple heuristic of a couple of beads of sweat.

But if you are, if you feel cold, you've not done a sufficient job and you should be able to like move around, feel, feel loose. And those are like some pretty good markers because as we start to warm up, I talked about all these different things like metabolism and one aspect is when we start to actually get physically warm, our fluids in our muscle tissue in our blood vessels in our fascia, they start to flow more freely between each other and it's called the Visco elastic properties of muscles and other tissues and actually getting physically warm allows that to happen easier. So you should feel looser just by actually getting physically

warm. I get it. I get it. Okay. So where do we go next? We know that we need to have our three buckets. We need to be warm. We need to begin to drill some of the movements and kind of prime ourselves mechanically. Does that include, does that include like sort of static stretching to open up range? What about dynamic stretching? I had Dr. Quinn Henneckon and we, he did his mobility myths and we spoke about the vibrating foam roller and the, oh, the great, the cushion gun and the one that's got Wi-Fi connectivity and it's got Bluetooth enabled and plays his Spotify songs and stuff like that. Like, you know, what do I need?

Yeah, I think Quentin and I are pretty similar lines for anyone that doesn't know Quentin and I are friends and he was actually a mentor of mine for a long time. So I'm not against static stretching when we look into a lot of the literature on it. There's some stuff that indicates that like, yeah, so if you do a challenging static stretch and then try to go into a physical activity that's very demanding, you're going to have a worse performance. We have some good information telling us that whereas that same information is a little bit challenged because if you do a hard challenging static stretch, but then move around a little bit more, which is what most people do. No one really, like, doesn't max effort hamstring stretch,

and then tries to immediately go into a max vertical jump. That's not really like what happens in real life. That's where the research came from on this. Wasn't it, there was one that I saw where people had done an extended quad stretch, and then it was force production on a quad extension as well. I'm getting this. That's precisely the same thing. Like, who does that? No one does like a one minute max effort, like quad stretch straight into then using that muscle. Exactly. And so that's where then we see

other studies that have done like where they do like that max effort one minute stretch, then they have people get up, walk around for a minute, and then do the the lay extension. And those people actually don't have a significant drop in performance. What do they gain? And those people actually don't have a significant drop in performance. What do they gain? Oh, that's another important one. They don't actually seem to gain anything. That's one of the things is like, people are very perseverating on the idea that static stretching is this magical thing.

And unfortunately, we don't really see anything telling us that. There are some arguments that static stretching can do a wide range of different things, but in most cases, we can get the same benefit from other activities and get it easier and better. Like, you know, the simplest thing of people's static stretch because I think they're going to get more range of motion. Okay, well, we actually have like some pretty strong research showing us that lifting weights through a full range of motion does that, but it also does it better. So then it's like, okay, why should I static stretch? And then

there's other stuff I'm like, okay, well, if you static stretch really, really hard, it can actually create hypertrophy. It can give you a bigger muscle, but it does it worse than lifting weights. And there's like just all these things of like, I don't know against it. If you enjoy it, go for it. But most people don't really enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah. So I did an episode since I did that one with Queen, he was like, episode number 12, I think that I did with him.

So we've done like nearly two million downloads since then. So there'll be a lot of people listening who didn't listen to that episode. I will link it in the show notes below. I employ you to go back and listen to Sam's peer, just dispel basically everything that you've ever done as part of a mobility routine. But yeah, he essentially said that people use static stretch, stack overhead stretch, let's say, typically with a poly bar so that they can open up their shoulders to get into a snatch.

But his argument was you can do that by snatching with the poly bar, plus you'll drill the movement, plus then you can slowly load up over time. We spoke about some tenuous information about activating the parasympathetic nervous system and kind of getting people into their body, but I'm going to guess, again, as you've said, you can drill that by moving into the more mechanical priming aspect. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah, essentially.

Hey, I've remembered. Do you ever know how to light a Quinn? I've remembered, man. I'm sure Quinn will be very happy to hear that. No, that's where we get into like some of the challenges of some of the traditional information of like, you know, stretch, go for a light jog, you know the challenges of some of the traditional information of stretch, go for a light jog, and you're good to go.

It's not inherently wrong, but it's maybe not the best advice either. And that's where I think a lot of the information has shifted, because most people don't have a ton of time to exercise. Most people don't have, if you're a professional athlete and you've got three to four hours, do whatever you want,

different conversations. But for me, I go to the gym four days a week, I've got usually like an hour to an hour and a half. I don't got a lot of time to screw around. And I really want to like maximize what I do, I give a shit about what I do. And so then it's like, what will give me the best outcomes with the reasonable investment. So, for most people, static stretching, pretty low on the list.

Whereas like dynamic movement, actually going in and out of deeper ranges controlling that motion. If you want to go into it, hold a little bit of a quote unquote stretch for a second. There's some value in some of those things. I would never say like there's none. For most people, they probably benefit from it. Because we can gear different aspects.

That's where some of the conversation would go in where we move past like the basic levels of what would be the central components of warm up and get into like what might take you to the next level because we can do some things where you like if you are someone that struggles into an overhead position for a squat or for an overhead squat or a snatch, you could do some lower level different activities like for instance a thoracic rotation drill that might allow you to then get into an overhead position better. We do have some research showing that going into higher levels of shoulder flexion, so basically taking my arm up above my head, if we proceed it with doing some sort

of thoracic motion drill, we can get an enhanced motion going overhead. So now you wouldn't necessarily get that by just snatching. But you could get that through doing a dynamic stretch first and then snatching. And that's where it comes into like the individual variation that people have and what they need. Like for me, I can get overhead just fine, but I have a challenge getting into a deep squat.

And so then for me doing some different things for my hips makes me be able to be more proficient when I actually start snatching. I get it. Yeah, it's, um, it first off, I'm very jealous of the fact that you can get into a good overhead position with it. I've been really leasing up first because I'm not in that camp, but then I can, I can happily sit on my heels, right? We all have our crosses, our mechanical crosses to bear in our bodies. So yeah, I really like the fact that we're now getting into a bit more of the nuance of it, right? Like it's not just black and white, it's not just that you need to do the movement. It's point, you know, you may be able to move the needle more

by not just going in and starting to snatch. There might be some things you can do, but they're likely to be a little bit more specific to your physiology. Cool, okay, so we've got the fact, we've got our three buckets, we've got the fact that there's some new ones in there. Let's start to talk about some nitty gritty. What are in your experience as a coaching person and online some of the best overall warmups that you can give people?

You know, if you were to just structure one, we want five minutes on a bike and this, and a dynamic and blah, blah. You know, what is going to give people 80% of the benefit broadly for the movements they're doing? Exactly. So most of the people that I work with are in a summer position of me.

They don't got a ton of time. And so then it comes back into that conversation of what can I do to get that 80% return with the investment. And for most of those people, it's going to be, I'm going to pick four to five different movements that has them moving through a different range of motion that they can do relatively moderate pace. And then that will achieve the first bucket of getting the warm. It'll achieve the second bucket of getting them through these deeper ranges. It won't necessarily get them primed up from the neurological standpoint because we'll get into that in a second.

But the other benefit that it does is it'll target those limitations that they often have. So for the majority of people, picking something like a thoracic mobility drill, because most people do generally have a limitation in their thoracic extension, which is going to impact their shoulder flexion. So if anyone is doing some sort of exercise with their arms past their shoulder and going overhead, which is like the majority of people. Like if you do a strict press, push press, incline bench press even, like any of these things, having improved shoulder flexion is going to be easier from doing that. So usually we're going to pick some sort of like thoracic extension or rotation drill. Can you describe what that would look like?

Yeah, so like you could do like a sideline windmill. So you lay on your side, bring a knee up towards your chest, and then with your top arm, you just make a big windmill. And I can see some videos if you want in the notes, but that's like a very easy one. It's not very complex, but most people instantly feel better once they do it. Like, you have someone try to reach your head, lay down, do it, boom, feels way better. Are you in a side plank while you're doing that?

Or are you just completely prone on the side on the ground? Yeah, laying flat on your side. Yeah. Go, go, go. Yeah, they're doing like some sort of hip movement. Again, most people are going to the gym. They're going to other do like a full body routine, a Metcon running something. So it's going to be realistically the majority of cases like a full body routine. So then we're going to get that upper body with

the sideline thrask windmill. Then we can get into a hip movement. So for a lot of people, in my experience, people usually will either struggle with a hip rotation, either an internal or external rotation. So like if you're sitting on a chair right now, and you try to bring your one foot across your midline, or you try to push it out, that's going to be like internal and external rotation. And people usually struggle with one or the other. And we can do this drill called a 90 90 hip rotation. So you're sitting on the ground, and you've got your, you've got one leg in front, one leg to your side, kind of like that classic herdler stretch. But then you have your front leg bent. And then what we do here is we rotate our hips forward and

back. And by doing this, we work through internal and external rotation. And if someone struggles with one, then they get the benefit of also doing the other one. And so the front leg is being stretched into external rotation. The rear leg is being stretched into inter-rotation, who are actively moving in and out of it. And so for most people, getting that allows us to then get into more hip extension, more hip flexion, and it's just like this super easy one that covers a ton of stuff. So unless I go through and find someone has a specific issue, it's just like an easy one to just say like 90% of people are going to benefit from it. Awesome.

Yeah. And then usually some sort of like trunk activation based exercise, so whether it be like a dead bug, a side plank, or some sort of more challenging variation. So you do, I guess. Do Miguel is loving it at the moment. He's here and he's here and all of his stuff coming through now. Yeah, he loves it. And at the end of the day, for most people, learning how to create some trunk tension is really beneficial. It's not like this magical thing, but for a lot of people,

it teaches them how to be able to create some tension in the trunk that allows us to be able to move around it better. And a lot of people just struggle with that. So it's an easy thing. So for most people, I would pick like those three as a minimum and then pick something struggle with that. So it's an easy thing. So for most people, I would pick like those three as a minimum and then pick something else usually. And then it's just like cycle through them for six to 12 reps and repeat for two to three sets. And you know, like if that's essentially what I do in my warm up, I can usually finish it off in five

ish minutes. And then I would go into like my first exercises and just gradually ramp up and do some skill work because the other advantage is when we're doing that neurological aspect I said most people are not perfectionists or a perfect technical precision demonstrators and whatever they're going to do. Like if you are a weightlifter, you probably aren't fantastic at snatching. You're probably okay, but you're probably not fantastic.

If you're a runner, you're probably not fantastic at running. You're probably okay. And so doing like five minutes of some technical skill work, it doesn't have to be done slow. It can actually be done relatively out of fast pace. We're just trying to be working on improving your precision with it so that as you get into your lifting, not only are you now warm, not only have you now improved

your neurological efficiency, but now hopefully over time, you're going to be more technically proficient. Because the goal is like when we actually lift or we actually run, you don't think about a lot. You should just be like doing the activity you're doing. And so hopefully by doing a little bit of it at the start where you're thinking and trying to be aware of what's going on,

you transfer that over time. I like that a lot. Yeah, you're totally right. Anyone that's doing a CrossFit class or anything, even just lifting in the gym on your own, that guy next to you, he's got three plates on there. Right, I better hurry up, I'll get three plates, I'm fuck, he's put another, he's put another plate.

Right, okay, well, you know what I mean? Like everyone's kind of distracted away from the integrity of their movement precision, just by, and especially, you know, you take it to cross, it'll be a lot of crossfit, it's listening. You take it to that, you know what it's like? Class gets going, the music gets turned up,

and you're like, what is it fucking get after it? And it's like, you know what I'm doing? You've got 15 minutes to establish a back squat, like it's like? Class gets going, the music gets turned up, and you're like, oh, it's fucking get after it. And it's like, don't do it. You've got 15 minutes to establish a back squat. Like it's fun. You don't need to hurry up. And everyone's like clattering plates on straight away. Exactly.

It's real funny, because I'll assume the majority of people listening here aren't freak savages with 700 pound back squats. And if you are squatting 400 pounds as you're one at max, you shouldn't need more, you shouldn't need 15 minutes to be able to establish that. Like, you don't need to rush into it. Like, I can hit a max squat in a squat just over 500 pounds and I could get there in like 12 minutes,

assuming that I've done a basic level of a warm up first. And so that's where like, spending some time doing that because most classes and most people working out are gonna go through basic level of a warm up first. And so that's where like spending some time doing that, because most classes and most people working out are gonna go through some level of warm up. So if you've not done a good job, then you're ready to start building up and you can do a little bit of practice work before rushing into it.

Yeah, I get that. So we've spoken about the fact that we've got our three buckets. We've spoken about the sideline windmill or anything else really that's going to get that thoracic moving. The hurdle is stretch, which I know how it looks. I hope the people listening do, if not, will get a link off you. It'll be in the show notes below if you're a little bit confused. What about cardio? Should I not be on an assault bike? What about a roller or a C2? That pretty much all of our warm-ups makers go for a run or sit on a bike or whatever before. What's your thoughts there? Yeah, so again it comes back into that like conversation of how much time

do you've got. And by no means is that a bad thing. It's just like I would put it as a lower priority. And if someone has the time, like I actually coach a bunch of crossfitters. And so most of them will do a five minute thing on either a run, an airdine or a Urg and they're going to do that first then they're going to get into their other stuff that I outlined. But most of those guys are training for like an hour and a half to two hours. And for them, I think that the merit is there to do it. And if they're doing activities that are more based on those as well, like if they're doing an Urg workout,

we're going to warm up on the Urg. If they're doing an org workout, we're gonna warm up on the org. If they're doing a running workout, we're gonna warm up running. But if you're doing lifting, if you're doing a lot of these other things, I'm gonna put less of a priority on that. Allow you to get warm through your movement, through your dynamic stuff,

all the rest of it. Okay, cool. So the main movement that I see people struggling with, especially in CrossFit class, and I'm speaking as patient zero for this, is the snatch. Is getting a barbell overhead, getting yourself into that position, especially if like me, people have been a bro for the last 10 years, and have just done that chest and biceps every twice a week. So can we talk about perhaps a slightly more specific stuff to help people get into that good overhead position, both lower and upper? Oh, yeah, absolutely, man. So again, we're going to be looking at when it comes to the upper portion, we're going to want to check off that box of the thoracic motions. It's going

to be really beneficial for the majority of people. And so that's, again, like that sideline windmill or we can get into something that's very specific. So when we're talking about the snatch, when we take our arms above our head, that's what we call like a thoracic extended position. And there are different drills that we can do, for instance, like a bench, T-spine mobe. So what happens here is we have a bench. We're to the side of it.

We're gonna put our elbows on it. We're kneeling. So kneeling, and you're almost in like a prayer position. Like you're gonna be praying on the bench. And then ideally you have a dowel in your hands and your palms are facing you. And that way you can then sit back and it takes you into a shoulder flex position

and that extends your thoracic spine and then you can bend your elbows and bring your hands back towards behind your head. So what this does here is by having our elbows bent, it puts a little bit more tension on our triceps, our triceps cross our shoulder joint so they can limit how much shoulder flexion we get so how well we can bring them overhead.

By going into shoulder flexion, it helps to encourage us getting into a thoracic extended position. And then by sitting back, what makes this drill specifically really great, is when we sit back, we go into some posterior pelvic tilting, some lumbar flexion. So essentially like our back rounds a little bit, it's unloaded, so it's fine. And the benefit there is that we see that in the research, when we go into a little bit of lumbar flexion, it limits how much motion occurs at the lower back and encourages at the upper back. So because our goal is to specifically try and encourage more upper back motion to get more shoulder motion, this drill just like works beautifully for that.

That's really cool. Yeah, so that's a great one. And then when we're talking about, again, snatching. So if everything else is moving there, I drill it so much to that, but a little bit different would be like a pullover exercise. This is one that actually Quinn is very well known for, but it's essentially where we just lay on our back. And then you can have a dowel, you can have a dumbbell, a kettlebell. I've probably not utilized a barbell specifically for your warm up, but you could.

And then you just laying there on your back, arms extended out, pointing towards the roof, holding something, and then you're gonna lower it down towards the ground above your head. So you're trying to flex your shoulders, so reaching up above, and as you do that, you're trying to reach out, trying to have your shoulders extend out more, and as you do that, you're trying to reach out, trying to have your shoulders extend out more, and then keep going back. And then as we do that, we're just trying to slowly go into that range and then come back up out of it. Now earlier we discussed the differences between static stretching and strengthening. And whether or not this is strengthening

different conversation, but it's like resistance-based stretching essentially. And so this is a type of motion. If we go really slow into it, that's called eccentric motion. And we've got some good research on different motions like this, showing that it actually does really well before exercise to enhance motion. And so then just doing a nice few repetitions, slowly into that range, and then coming back out out of it is going to enhance how well you can bring your arms above your head. Is that sort of biceps brushing that is in that position? Yeah, okay. And would you advise knees up or feet up, so knees are a little bit of an angle or legs out flat? So my preference would be more towards like the knees up. So if you can think of like that dead bug position, like bringing them up all the way that far, because what that does, it really encourages people to make sure that they're putting the motion at their shoulders, because one thing going into too much extension in that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I can see how that would happen

if your legs were out straight. You'd be tight in the hips and you'd push up through the midline, right? Yeah, or if you're tight through the upper back and shoulders, then you use your lumbar spine to extend, to get around having to go through them. That's one of the reasons, like, for a lot of people that are maybe not as competent going overhead, you'll see them extend at their lower back a lot more. That's me.

That's me all day. That's me. That's the describing me. You've seen me snatch some. I think I've of some videos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so we've got ourselves in with that. I've just noticed there's something

that I'm meant to bring up. What about PNF? Is it a place for PNF and can you describe what that is? Yes, if anyone that doesn't know, PNF is a really fancy term. It's originally from a company that formulated it and it's called proprioceptive neuroboscler facilitation.

And it's nothing special. Sorry, sorry. I love it. I love it. Yeah, you know, like theoretically, there's a lot of like mechanisms that they talk about and like in, you know, in physio school to give you like all these different terminologies to memorize about PNF. And then you get into the real world, you start to see how

like these different theories about it actually just like match up with basic levels of resistance exercise and then you see how a lot of the different components of the motions just like again a lineup when you do good things like if you go slowly into a motion like an eccentric stretch that we just talked about, when we're looking at these different things, it essentially just like doesn't show up to be anything special. And the terminologies make it sound cool. And some of the stuff in the rationale, they say, sounds fantastic when they start talking about,

you know, reciprocal inhibition, all these different terminologies that start thrown at you. But most of the time, it's just like, that's shit that we get when we just lift weights anyways. Yeah. And I think that's like a really common thing in like the physio, chiropractic, and like all the rehab world, is essentially like make things sound more complicated

and that means that it's actually way better. And it's like a big load of bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, there's this. It's just refresh ratey to me. Yeah, I bet it is. It's like that. Signaling, right? It's like look at my technical expertise. I'm using this word which sounds so

convoluted. I mean, you know, you don't need to worry. Don't worry about the about the the technical re-adduction inhibition or whatever it is. Like you don't need to worry about that. Like, yeah, okay, so don't fuck around with PNF. I don't think we actually describe what PNF is, but it's essentially putting yourself into a stretch and then forcing muscle contraction in that stretch to then allow yourself to stretch further, right? Is that close to a description?

Well, that's like one aspect of PNF. That's the hard part is like, so people that are like in the details of PNF, it's like a whole system of structures. It'd be like saying what is CrossFit and you describe a snap. Oh, holy fucking shit. I didn't realize that open Pandora's Box. Is that what the PNF stands for? Pandora's... Yeah, yeah. ...sit down.

...sit down. ...sit down. ...sit down. Pandora's Box, yeah. Okay, so no PNF. We've just... We're snatching. We've decided to do our thoracic stretch, we've

got down into our preposition, we've got a dowel out, we've also made Quinn happy because we've got ourselves into a dead bug and we've allowed our hands to come up and over our head, like one kilo dumbbells are like a dowel or like just sunnets super, super light, right? So yeah, like you don't, you don't want to grab a 45 pound bar and start busting out, like 20 kilos is too much for most people. Whereas like, you know, when I do it, I grab a 10 pound dumbbell or so it'd be like a four kilos for most for all the metric system users, I am metric system.

So, but you still my American friends. And I just lay back, busted out and then not good to go. Are you sorry, just for clarity here, are you having palms facing forward towards the ceiling or palms facing in towards the ears? Yeah, so that depends on what you're holding. So if you're holding a dowel, you're going to have palms facing the ceiling. For dumbbells. For dumbbells, you're holding a dumbbell.

You're likely going to be holding it palms facing each other. Okay. Cool. Yeah, because as you get more narrow, so essentially if you're grabbing a small dumbbell, you're likely going to be holding it palms facing each other. Yeah, because as you get more narrow, so essentially if you're grabbing a small dumbbell, it's going to be a little bit more narrow. The more narrow position while keeping your palms facing the roof is going to be more challenging to hold. It can be a little irritable to some people. It's one of the reasons why people have a little bit easier time.

If you lay on your back and you try and take your arms above your head and you go into your snatch grip position, it's easier to hit the floor than if you go into your jerk grip position. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you see these, I'm sure you'll have seen them, these videos online, if like these hyper mobile people, Sony Webster, who I'll send this video to one of my buddies, past modern wisdom guests, like he's got videos of him going into us actually touching the ground

with a barbell overhead and his hands crossed in like some weird power rangers shit. It's like, what is your construction? Honestly man, I came, so he was on a night out, he was in the living room just through the back there once after we'd been on a night out and I came in in the morning and he was stretching. You know, people just do that stretch.

They put their arms in the end and they do this. And you can see my, my nose essentially just lateral with my body when I put my arms out. I promise you his arms were parallel going backwards behind him, like a bird, like a bird at the top of the flap. And I was thinking this is what happens when you do weightlifting at a high level from like the age of 10, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.

Insane, man. And he does it under control. Like it's just, that's what you want. Okay, so we got that. We've got ourselves into some good movements there. Are we going to lower or is there anything else we need to do with upper to prep ourselves through for a snatch? No, I think for most people, they're good to go like at that point.

And then when we're getting to the lower body stuff, again, like that 90, 90 motions, so like somewhere to that hurdle or position, that's going to be a good starting point. And then after that, you know, maybe some sort of ankle motion exercise. So similar to the shoulder flexion one where we're laying on our back and then pulling the dumbbell overhead, doing it, that's an eccentric base stretch. I think doing something similar to that for the calf is really beneficial. So most people are going to struggle with having their knee go forward. And when your knee goes forward, it allows you to stay more upright,

which is really beneficial in a snatch. It's really beneficial in most activities, but again, people struggle with that. And getting some sort of like deeper calf raise type exercise done first, can usually allow for that. Like if you set up on the edge of a step, and then you lower down for like three to four seconds, pause for a second in the bottom, and then come back up,

just like what we're doing for that overhead one, it's gonna be really beneficial, and if you do it steadily over a long time, it's gonna help to increase that range of motion, get you comfortable able to control the position too, and have a really good transfer when you start to snatch. Is that one foot one leg at a time or both together? The biggest deterring there for one foot versus two foot,

I would say is like how strong the person is, because if you can't really get out of a one leg and one very well, you probably just want to do two feet. Man, a lot of people, I think a lot of people don't realize how weak their calfs are. As a physio who does a lot of work with different people, I work with a lot of runners and triathlites, and they come in and I make them like bust out legitimately good quality calf raises, they are often quite shocked at how weak they are. Especially as people who use them all the time, right?

They're using the calves every day. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so we've got that. We've got ourselves, I think that's the, that's, I was to do a survey of what movement do you struggle with. I think Snatch might be number one, but why don't we do a couple of bonus rounds?

What else do you find people coming to you and saying, hey Sam, I need a warm up for this movement? What's some of the common requests? Yeah, a deadlift is a pretty common one. And I think like, you know, when we're looking at, things that are different from the snatch, you know, like a squat, I'm gonna probably do a lot of similar things as what that are different from the snatch, like a squat, I'm going to probably do a lot of similar things

as what we just outlined for the snatch, similar requirements, other than the aspect of the front rack, which a lot of people do struggle with, and we could talk about, getting into the bottom position of the clean is going to be similar from the hip standpoint, but there's going to be a little bit different aspect

for the front rack, and then otherwise, the deadlift is a pretty different one because we have like a much higher demand on being able to get deep into the hips because if you're doing a good job, like you're not squatting the weight, whereas you're going to be keeping your legs more extended and then hinging at the hips to a higher degree. And so for a lot of people, that's going to be like a different demand. So I guess we could jump into either the front rack or the deadlift,

which we're feeling, I'm feeling let's deadlift first, and then we'll do the front rack. Yes, and when we're talking about the deadlift again, couple of the main things that challenge most people is gonna be that deep hip flexion position, particularly with the knees extended, because essentially for most people, they feel like perhaps you're just gonna rip off. And I'm gonna guess, sorry you interject there,

I'm gonna guess that what that causes some people to do is probably stay to upright at the bottom of a deadlift, right, and squat into it too much. Yeah. Interesting, yeah, because I see, all of the guys that I know that I've got some friends, Johnny, one of the co-hosts of this show, he's deadlifted

307 in the 105's so he's like he's got a regional record up here Yeah, and you see the position that he gets into and he's not squatting the way He's squatting the way when he's when it's his time to squat, but when it's deadlifting, he doesn't do that Exactly as what you see with people that are very proficient at deadlifting. And it's one of the reasons why, like, if you ever watch Sunni as an example, Sunni deadlift, and how he does it compared to that guy, it would look probably quite different. And it's because Sunni, while he's still strong, he's not like a high level deadlift or he's a high level weightlifter.

And when weightlifters set up, they're, they're not looking to maximally deadlift. They're looking to perform a higher velocity-based movement. That's going to set them up to receive a weight in a different position. So it's just like a drastically different position. But that's one of the reasons they set up with their knees more forward and more of a squatting, tight-pitched movement. The problem is that if someone is trying to legitimately develop the big weight and be very strong in that position is that if someone's trying to legitimately delve the big weight

and be very strong in that position, that's not the position to do it from. I wonder how many people that do CrossFit perhaps have started to confuse the mechanics, thinking to me, doing it. I probably do. I probably think, oh, well, a deadlift, just a hardcore claim with an over-undergriff, you know?

Yeah, no, that's actually a really common thing. Yeah, definitely. Interesting. Okay, so we're dead lifting. You need to got cells into that position. How are we gonna do that? Yeah, so I think for a lot of people, again, starting off that 99-odd drill,

just to like clear off some stuff, boom, get it done. And then we could get into getting the hamstrings a little bit more comfortable and getting into a deep position. And so a good exercise for that is where you have like a rig or a doorway or something that's gonna be like firm, stay in place, and then you can put your leg against it and then have your other leg down by the side,

so what you're gonna do is you're gonna lay in your back and you're gonna put one leg extended up on the rig, the doorway, whatever it is. And then we'll start off having both legs up. And then you're going to lower down the one leg that's in the doorway or beside the rig. And the other one stays in place. And your goal is to be able to lower down towards the ground while keeping your legs straight. You'll see a lot of people try to bend their leg, your goal, keep it straight, keep your

back pressed into the ground, don't let it arch up. And then over time, you work closer and closer to having your butt touch the rig and having your leg extended. So the further out you are, the less hip flex you'll be in, and the more you get close to the rig, the more flex you'll be, and the same with your knee extensions. If you feel that really struggle, are gonna be really far out, have their knee bent,

and then people that are really comfortable with it are gonna be basically their butt against with like totally straight. And then going through, essentially some are kinda set up where you're going down nice and slow, three to four seconds, pausing that bottom position, come back up, and then switch sides, and do as many times as you feel.

The thing here is like, if you get to point where you're just like absolutely demolishing it, then you can come off the rig and try and maintain that like up. That's going to put a higher demand on having like trunk activation. Oh my god. It's a great exercise. It's great exercise. It is a great exercise. Sometimes it's terrible. Yeah., I think for a lot of people doing that 90, 90 position, doing that, and then doing some sort of like, lat-based activation exercise. So we essentially want some sort of like pullover-based exercise, but different then. So like when we did the pullover earlier, and we're talking about the snatch, the emphasis

was on getting the shoulders opened up overhead, whereas now we're looking to come down and bring the hands by your side as you do a pullover. And so like that same position doesn't work very well. But instead, what we could do is like be standing, a little bit bent over position, have a band out in front of us, and then pull our arms down by our sides.

So it's like you're trying to sweep your hands back by your side. Have we looped the band around a rig here? Or is it literally just between our hands? I would loop it around the rig. Okay, I would. The rig and we're just pulling down and, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And doing that is going to allow you to get a little bit more lat activation. The lats are really beneficial in deadlifting, whether it be from the standpoint of being able to help maintain the barclature body, but then also your lats actually have Attachment into your spine and so when they have a higher level of attachment we can create more stability around the spine

But focusing on driving those shoulders down towards the ground Drac, yeah Yeah, yeah for everyone deadl thing don't pull your shoulder blades back pull them down Okay, why is that? Yeah, for everyone deadlething, don't pull your shoulder blades back, pull them down. Okay, why is that? Well, so if you think about physics, when we do a deadlift, we want to reduce the range of motion, so we want to have to move the bar as little as we need to. And if you have your arms in place and you pull your shoulders back, it actually increases

the relative length because now your chest is closer to the ground and you show the move the bar at the same distance, whereas if you put your shoulder blades down, it'll relatively decrease the length that you have to move. And the other benefit is that actually increases your lat activation, whereas pulling them back does not. Got you. I once got red-pilled on what low bar squatting means by Johnny. And he was telling me about, is it moment 4-Sarm? Is that what it's called?

It's called a moment arm. Yeah. Yeah, he fully red-pilled me one day about that. And I was like, OK, no worries, man. Right. We're going to either front squat or we're going to prep for our clean. How are we sorting out our front rack? So I think doing a thoracic rotation or extension drill

kind of like those ones we discussed earlier, so either the sideline windmill or the bench mob, those are two great options to start off with. But then things get different because we're not going overhead really. And so instead what a lot of people complain about with the front rack is having like wrist discomfort. So a lot of people will like complain,

grab the wrist, see that's bothersome. And it's because like at the end of the day, it does require you to get into a decent amount of wrist extension. The difference though is that for people that usually don't complain about it, they usually have pretty good shoulder external rotation. And if you think about it, like when I'm in this position, this is where my arm can set up. I have to really extend my wrist hard back if I can't rotate outwards very well, but if I can rotate out really well, and then I don't have to extend my wrist as much. That's where if you ever see like a video of cloak-off doing a push-press

or any kind of position like that, the dude has almost a straight wrist. And his wrist is not extended, but he has like such good external rotation that he's able to get into that position and be very strong from there. Bro, so to interject there, I saw Body Power 2018 was when I first met Sonny, right? So two years ago, and we're on a stand with a full rig setup and we're doing muscle ups and chilling out. Sonny comes and does a little, he wasn't booked on it, does a little presentation. And Clockov walks by and he sees him doing his circus lifting and then he messes, so Sonny messaged him and was like, hey man, do you

want to, should we do something tomorrow? Because he's got his Clockov brand of weights and plates and bars and stuff and they had a big lifting platform over there. And he just replied, I can't remember what he replied, but it was like the most Russian, it was like, yes, tomorrow, strict press. And it's like, fuck, fuck. So you watch, clock-offs, he put like, I think he jerked, two, 10 from the rack,

like just like, animal, absolute animal. And yeah, him and Sonny are doing stuff and there's like a couple of videos floating around of it. That was really cool. But the man, met him, said, hello, said, like, I think I really like sort of what you do and blah, blah. The dude shook my hand and I swear to God, it was like, you remember when you were a kid and you used to put on your dad's slipper pretend to be your dad. I put hand into his hand. I was like, there's room in here. I could sell this is real estate. Like this genuine square footage inside of this thing.

Yeah, he's just like an absolute thick beast. Everything about him is very thick, isn't it? Yeah, even his neck. Come on. Actually, I want to ask you about that. I want you to ask Everything about him is very thick, isn't it? Yeah, even his neck, come on. Actually, I wanna ask you about that. I want you to ask someone for ages. Why does clock-ups set up with his knees out so wide in that particular position? Because I don't see many weightlifters

set up in that position for the clean. Oh, in the clean? He doesn't have a snatch, too, right? Like, I'm sorry. You talking about his bottom position? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's funny, because I actually set up very similar to Clockofend. It's like really common for, so I started about like these hip rotation things and for

individuals who have a limited hip internal rotation, it's hard to maintain your knees directly forward in front of you because you don't actually have that interrotation. And so then if you turn your feet out, turn your knees out, it allows you to get around to that. And if you know, I've never assessed Klaukov, I can't claim to have done that. But I've watched thousands of videos if he had moved. And you can just tell in the way that he chooses to do a lot of things that he inherently has that same issue. And it's really common in a lot of like that he inherently has that same issue. It's really common in a lot of larger males to have that limitation. It's just a likely scenario for him. You see that a lot in a lot of Russian-descented males where they have limited hip-interno rotations, so then they set it that way. That's why you see it a lot across Ukrainian lifters, some Belarusian lifters, all these different kind of people

where they have like that similar bottom position and they also squat in a similar way. Yeah, just like very different from a lot of other places. I guess girls don't know how good they've got it with the Q-Shay pelvis in there. Maybe not, it's hard to say. Well, yeah. There's benefits and limitations in all these things, right? They've got the pain of childbirth, but they've got the benefit of a deep squat, like, you know, throughout life.

So yeah, pluses and minuses. Okay, so we've got, we're talking about Front Rack. We've talked about that external rotation. What we're doing for it. So a good one is going to be simple, simple as fantastic, especially we're talking online. No one's going to give it, understand why I give a complicated exercise. Simple is fantastic, especially we're talking online, no one's gonna give it, understand why I give a complicated exercise. So, simple thing, you're gonna lay on your back, you're gonna have your elbows up to your side,

and then you're gonna try and bring your knuckles to the ground. So, you're gonna have arms bent, so you're gonna make like a, like a, a U shape. And what you're gonna do here is, if you can get your knuckles to the ground, okay, you pass that test, nice job. Now, what you're gonna do here is if you can get your knuckles to the ground, okay, you pass that test, nice job.

Now what you're gonna do is you're gonna put your elbows on top of something like the edge of a 25 pound plate, a little step up something that you can increase the range of motion and then repeat. And then you can hold on to like a 2.5 pound plate, a 5 pound plate, something relatively light. That's just gonna help to pull you back into that range, sort of like the shoulder flexion exercise. And just slowly go back, then come back out of it. And what's that gonna do is it's gonna pull you

into shoulder external rotation, and then you can scroll back out of it. And it'll allow you to have that extra range that hopefully you're able to get into a more excellent rotated position and less stress on your wrists. Got you. So for the people who need a little bit more clarification there,

it's like the classic double-by-set pose from a body builder, right? Exactly. But instead of that, we've got shoulders of running at a straight line, arms are at 90 degrees, then I'm gonna guess as they go back that angle maintains that forearm to upper arm angle maintains as we go back. Yeah, exactly.

Cool. And then again, slow on the eccentric, touching the floor and then coming back up, you just coming back up to vertical, like as you're on the floor. Yeah. Cool. What do we do? Is a bonus round. How can I sort of, that's my external rotation.

Yeah, but how about improving my internal rotation on my arms? What should I be doing for that? Oh, I like actually just the opposite. Keep going down. Okay. Okay. It's a very simple one and it's really effective, especially if the conversation is about weightless thing, because if you think about snatching or cleaning, you're basically in that exact position. You have an extended torso, you've a scented up and your arms are right there. Yeah, exactly. And so it's highly specific, which is going to be really beneficial. The only thing there is that I tell people that they should take their, they should do one arm at a time. And they should take their non-moving

arm and they should put it on the front of their shoulder. And that way they can feel as they turn down. If their shoulder starts to pop up, like it leaves the ground, then they're not really moving through their shoulder anymore, and they should stop going down and then come back up. Because the emphasis is on like shoulder motion. And so if you're just getting more motion because like your shoulder blades moving funky or you're moving out of your back,

like that's not the desire because you don't want that during the motion. So let's just keep it to what you're looking for and keep it on the shoulder. That movement that you shaped line on the ground, I'm going to guess is that definitely meets our criteria for 20% with 80% of the benefit, right? You know, you can just continue that down and then go back up and you've sorted your internal and external rotation with one exercise. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I like it.

That's one of the big winners. I'm just thinking about some of the other things that people might want to prime for. How about lower traps? How about someone potentially again, like me, a little bit of a bro, tightening the upper traps, tightening the chest, that rolled forward classic sort of bro lifter type posture.

How can I prime myself to get back and down? So assume that you've gone through these other things that we just discussed, particularly like the thoracic motion or any of those ones, because those are gonna be really beneficial to get some thoracic extension. But then after that, a nice easy one is where, you know, you lay on your stomach.

So you just did the W1 for instance, you could just progress off this or if it's not relevant, like if you're not snatching or you just want to get some lower trap activation for other reasons, you just lay flat on your stomach, face down towards the ground, and then you're going to take your arms so that you make like a T-shape so your arms are straight up to your sides, and then you're going to lift your arms up, and then you're going gonna try and make like a snow angel motion over to try to bring your thumbs together overhead.

As you do this, your goal is to keep your chest down on the ground, and that way you have to actively lift up through your shoulder blades. And that way, you're utilizing your lower trap, you're using your rhomboids, these other musculatures of your upper back that require you to use scapular motion. Now, if you're not able to get all the way overhead, I'm gonna guess like you might struggle with that. Just go as far as you can, and then come back down and repeat.

And, you know, like if people are trying to find this exercise, if you Google like Prone Angels, it's a common extra name for it, they can find variations of where it's shown. It's like, you just lay flat on your stomach, lift your arms up, and then try and bring them, a lot of times you'll see people like go all the way back down to their hips

and then come back up overhead. And it can be a great way also just for developing the upper back to. Good, you okay. So we've got palms are flat to the ground, arms are up to the sides. Yeah. And then we're just gonna take them up,

and then we're gonna allow them to come back down. I can, like that would, that must feel probably quite nice. I can imagine that feels quite nice. Would you ever, if you became quite proficient at that and then got yourself to overhead, would you then maybe add like a 0.25 plate or a 0.5 plate like into either hand to start progressively overloading? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We've got it. Quinn, Quinn, mate, if you need some advice from me at any point about how you need to do your warm-ups or something, just come speak to me, I'll give you a bit of a few tips. Man, I think we've got it. I think we've managed to create a pretty good robust warm-up for people. So why don't we do a recap so

that people know what they're going away with for this week? How are they going to move the needle this week on the warm up? Absolutely. So first thing, get warm. Figure out whether you want to do that on the urg, the bike, or doing some dynamic movements. Pick a few different dynamic movements. If that's going to be your main thing, or if you just want to check off some boxes for getting it out of the ranges you're going to go to If we're talking about being in like a CrossFit class or general lifting, try to do like a thoracic

range of motion drill, some sort of trunk stability exercise, some sort of hip motion exercise. And then after that, either do some accessory range of motion drills if you need to, such as like the shoulder ones we discussed or the hip ones. Afterwards, get into the specific exercises that you're going to start to do for the day, do some skill work for a few minutes, get moving fast on it though, be deliberate with it, and then get into what you're doing. Start training.

Man, I love it. I like the idea of getting the warm up, really cutting it down to size. You are right as well. Everybody's strapped for time now, especially in CrossFit class, the people like the fact that you can get in and get out. The powerlifters that are listening us to meet you, the fact that you guys go into the gym and you have to spend, because of the some of the rest that you need, you've got to spend two hours plus in the gym, but the total tonnage that you've moved, maybe it's not that much, it's just that you've put yourself under so much stress. I like it. I like it a lot. And then just the final thing, you know, we talked about some of the specific stuff for movements. Is there a way that you would

be able to begin using your movement or begin doing your movement? That's how I'm going to start snatching. And then interlace that with some of the positional stuff. Or would you have warm up is warm up and then once warm up is finished it is lifting or would you then maybe start to try and interspersed them? So like I'm a big fan of people doing something active in between their warm upsets. So like if you are doing technical skill work or just like light snatching those kinds of things, doing one of the range of motion type exercises in between sets, particularly if it's one that you find really

beneficial to you, because it helps to ingrain it even better. The thing that I would say is like once you get into your actual working sets, I would like try to limit that because you want to legitimately rest if you're trying really hard. So, you know, like if you are a 60 kilos snatcher and you find that like doing that overhead that shoulder flexion drill is really beneficial, do it up until you get to like 50 kilos and then shut her down and get into your working sets. Man, I love it. I love it. We've made it, man. We've gone through. We've got a great warm up.

I'm super, super impressed. Where should people go? They want to hassle you online. You've just rebranded, kind of. You've just changed it. I couldn't find you on Instagram. Yes. On Instagram, I am Dr. Sam Spinelli.

I also have accounts of citizen athletics and E3 rehab. So they can find me there. If they're looking for fitness-based stuff. So this is an athletics is a great resource, lots of stuff. YouTube channel now where we're trying to pump out high quality content. And then E3 rehab, if you're looking for rehab stuff, tons of resources there. I love it, dude. We've done it. Thank you so much for your time. Everything that we've spoken about will be linked in the show notes below. This episode's awesome.

Like send it to a friend, find a person that you think, fuck, like they need to know how to warm up as well. Send it to them and yeah, at the time I'm gonna have to get you back on my mind, I need to find something else to talk to you about now. Thanks for having me on, Chris. That was great. Pleasure. Catch you later, man. Thank you very much for tuning in.

If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend. It would make me very happy indeed. Don't forget, if you've got any questions or comments or feedback, feel free to message me at Chris Willek on all social media. But for now, goodbye friends.