Not Your Average Coach’s Warm Up – Part 1

Growing up, did you ever start practice with ‘a lap’?

You know, a jog around the field or court, following your Captains like they are leading you to the glory land? 

We’ve all done it and we’ve learned from it, right? So now, we do more intensive stretching and ballistic movements. 

You can’t see it, but my face is cringing. 

When I first came into the Parisi system in 2011, the cliche saying was “Our warmup is your workout” and in a way, 11+ years later, it still probably is, but it has evolved from “let’s work these kids over” to…

“Let’s lay some context down for our athletes to better understand today’s training session.”

Cool, eh?

But let me backup a little bit.

Pillars of the Active Dynamic Warm Up

To kick-off the first part of this new blog series, I want to start by addressing the pillars of the Parisi ADW. In Parisi-Land we break our ADW up in to three main portions.

• Stationary
• Movement
• Ground Activation

I think it’s important to recognize that there are A LOT of different ways to program an ADW or any kind of ‘prep’ work for an athlete, and to be honest, a lot of them work well if they cover a few key concepts:

• Rehearsal Movements: movements that mimic a specific movement or, if it is a strength training session, our main lift.
• Plane of Movement: incorporate movements that are done in all planes of motion (sagittal, transverse, and frontal), not focusing on just one.
• Neural Muscular and Muscle Activation: Sending action potentials (signals) to the muscles that need to be used, and sending quick responses to active muscles through the nervous system by using quick repetitive/ ballistic movements.

Within our three pillars (stationary/movement/ground activation) we look to address those key concepts in a developmentally appropriate way.

What that sentence means is that we like to put our developing athletes in an environment for movement success.

Laying the Foundation

For example, with our Jump Start group, athletes between the ages of 7-9 years old, we want them to rehearse movements specific to the training session, like sprinting, but may only have them perform movements in the frontal plane (marching and skipping) because their current level of ability may only allow for success there.

Will we get transverse at some point and have them perform something like a pivot to sprint, sure. But that’s where progression comes in. I think it is a quick point to make that not every session needs to cover everything, rather, the training program as a whole should build exposure as appropriate.

To sum up where we are, the Parisi ADW consists of stationary, movement, and ground activation exercises. Within each of these areas we look to expose athletes to patterns that they will be doing in the training session, planes of movements that they can own and grow from, and add in an increasing neurological demand.

Following so far? Stay tuned for part two where we pull back the curtain a little bit and show you what this all looks like.

What’s next?

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