Moderate to low intensity home fitness warm-up time

There is no unified standard answer for warm-up for low- to medium-intensity home fitness. For healthy adults, 5-10 minutes is usually sufficient. People with weak physical fitness and long-term sedentary life can appropriately extend it to about 12 minutes. Sports enthusiasts who train frequently can even activate it in 3 minutes.

When I led a group of mothers in the community to practice Pamela's elementary exercises, I initially asked everyone to do a 10-minute warm-up to save trouble. As a result, two sisters who often ran half-marathons always complained that they had no energy to do the exercises after the warm-up. On the contrary, a mother who had just given birth to a baby for half a year said that her knees were still stiff after the 5-minute warm-up, and she had to do 3 more minutes of hip circles and waist rotation before she dared to keep up with the rhythm. You see, for the same low- to medium-intensity home exercises, the warm-up time required by people with different foundations is quite different.

Nowadays, there are actually two different logics for judging the length of warm-up in the sports circle. No one is right or wrong, they just focus on different directions. One is more pragmatic and feels that there is no need to waste time. There is only one standard for a good warm-up: the body is slightly warm, there is no stickiness in the joint movements, and there is no lag when you raise your hands to kick your legs, squat down and turn around. Even if it only takes you 2 minutes to reach this state, it is completely sufficient. The other is from the perspective of exercise physiology. It is believed that the risk of muscle strain can be effectively reduced by raising the core temperature by 0.5-1°C. Therefore, at least 5 minutes of warm-up time should be allowed, especially in winter when the temperature at home is low or when you wear thicker clothes. The surface temperature rises slowly, and the time is too short to achieve the activation effect.

I have been practicing bodyweight training at home for three years. To be honest, I don’t even look at the timer when I warm up now. In the summer, I turn on the air conditioner at 26 degrees Celsius and wear short sleeves. Before practicing the shuttlecock exercise, I do jumping jacks for 1 minute, rotate my shoulders, neck and wrists for 30 seconds each, and do two deep squats. If there is no heating at home in the winter, and you just get up from the sofa wrapped in plush pajamas, you have to stand still for two minutes, and then move your hip joints, thoracic vertebrae, and ankles one by one. Your hands and feet will be stiff for seven or eight minutes, and it is easy to stretch yourself when exerting force. If you have just worked a 10-hour shift one day to catch up on the plan, and your waist is as hard as a slate, then you must add an extra 2 minutes of cat-cow pose and thoracic spine rotation. Even if the total warm-up time is extended to 12 minutes, it doesn't matter. It is better than losing your waist halfway through the exercise.

Of course, there are two common pitfalls that I would like to remind everyone. Don’t think that you can skip the warm-up when doing low-intensity exercise. Even if you only practice Baduanjin for 20 minutes, you still need to move your wrists and ankles a little. After sitting for a long time, you suddenly twist your body or lower your waist. It is really easy to stretch your trapezius muscles or waist and abdomen. Don't think that the longer the warm-up is, the better. If the warm-up takes more than 15 minutes, the glycogen will be almost depleted, and the subsequent main training intensity will not increase, which means it is in vain.

In fact, to put it bluntly, home fitness is meant to be convenient and comfortable. There is no need to hold a stopwatch to calculate the warm-up time. Your own body feeling is always more reliable than the standard answer. Don’t be too perfunctory and don’t overdo it. It’s better to practice comfortably without getting hurt.