Hey Sally, how are you doing today?  How about you spend 15 minutes warming up on the bike / elliptical / treadmill / arm bike and I’ll be right with you.

How many times do you hear this at a traditional physical therapy clinic?   In the strength and conditioning realm, using a warm-up like this is absolute heresy.  For some reason it still persists in the world of physical therapy though.

I’ve got to be honest, I’ll use the stationary bike and cardio equipment if I feel it’s really needed for my patients (cardio for chronic pain or nerve gliding effects – stationary bike for improving knee flexion in total knees).  However, I feel a pang on guilt giving this to other patients who could really benefit from a well done dynamic warm-up.  

It definitely takes more education, time and work on the therapist’s part to teach a warm-up like this but I also feel that the benefits are well worth it.  I base my warm-ups on the joint-by-joint approach popularized by Gray Cook and Mike Boyle.  It also fits well with my treatment which usually contains a heavy dose of SFMA guided exercise and manual therapy.   This is also a tremendous tool for post op lower extremity patients once they’re clear from a protocol perspective to get started on these movements.

Here is a video of a common lower extremity dynamic warm-up I use in the clinic for my patients.  Feel free to steal it and use the video as a refresher for patients who forget the movements (I usually send them home with a paper with the exercises written as well).  Sorry in advance for the horrendous audio quality.  Here’s me in action teaching the dynamic warm-up.

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A few weeks back I had the opportunity to work with games athlete Scott Panchik during the Power Monkey Fitness camp.  Scott is an amazing athlete and great person and I just wanted to share the experience.

Scott came to me with a lot of pain and limitation in range of motion.  As you can see from the video, extension was one of the most limited motions.  This can royally screw up your ability to keep a neutral eye gaze during olympic lifts or head position during jerks.  Of course this is a problem as Scott was in the middle of dominating the Crossfit Team Series (Team Reebok East).  Scott was in a bind because he had the next event in the team series in just 4 days.

He was also at the point where he was severely limited with his exercise selection and wasn’t able to get through any olympic lifting without stopping halfway through the session due to pain.  We focused a lot on regaining ROM in his neck with a lot of manual work.  Through the SFMA we found he was limited with upper cervical mobility so we spent a lot of time there as well as with a large serving of soft tissue work.  We also talked a bit about pain science and the importance of keeping moving and modifying things in a smart way.  Throw in some thoracic and CT grade 5 joint mobs, some deep neck flexor training and scap stability with ROM and voila.  Scott was feeling much better after 3 sessions and went back and killed it in the team series.  Scott wrote me a nice little thank you as well.

During the Power Monkey Camp I strained my neck and had limited range of motion in every direction.  I wasn’t …read more