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

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, humans of Podcastland. Welcome back. My guest today is Dr. Sam Spinelli, and we are talking about how to design the perfect warmup routine. Everybody that exercises has to have some sort of warmup 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 warmup routine. 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 got an 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?

**Sam Spinelli** (1:37)
Oh, man, I think I'm gonna have to shift towards Skype today. If you asked me before, I would have said a different answer, but...

**Chris Williamson** (1:43)
We have had an absolute 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 one at the start of every CrossFit class. When I did Thai boxing, I was warming up there. I've got programmed warmups from my swim coach. If I do swimming or anything, you warm up to do it. I even cough a little bit before I speak on a podcast. Everything has that on ramp to begin it, right? But I don't know, where do we start?
Why do we warm up? Why should we do it?

**Sam Spinelli** (2:24)
No, it's a really important question. And at the end of the day, whenever it comes to any of these activities whether 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 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 within.

**Chris Williamson** (3:12)
I get it. Where do we start? I'm going to do something. Let's presume, because there could be a million different warmups, a million different sports. But I think if we take something like CrossFit slash power lifting slash a run endurance sort of thing, it's the broad spectrum of what we're looking at. Where do we start with that?

**Sam Spinelli** (3:33)
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's basically like three buckets 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 gotta 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 warm.