Before exercising, warm up well, otherwise it is easy to get injured. This is a truth that all students who have attended physical education classes in primary school know. But warming up, just to reduce injury? It's much more than that! In fact, choosing the right warm-up movements can not only better prevent sports injuries, but also increase the strength growth and training effect in your training!

1. Prime mover & antagonist muscle in strength training?

We know that muscles during exercise can be divided into "prime mover muscles" and "antagonist muscles". For example, when you do curls, the biceps brachii on the inside of the arm actively shortens, which is the "prime mover muscle", and the triceps brachii on the outside of the arm is passively relaxed and stretched, which is the "antagonist muscle".

Prime mover & antagonist: When muscle group A contracts concentrately, muscle group B contracts accordingly, and muscle group B is considered to be the antagonist muscle of muscle group A. Generally, antagonist muscles are mostly distributed on the anterior and dorsal sides of the bone, with the second and third brachial muscles as antagonist muscles, the thorax and back as antagonist muscles, and the femoral and femoral four are also antagonist muscles.

In sports, dealing with the relationship between prime mover and antagonist muscle is a university question. Many people who are new to fitness do not do well and are not standard, that is, they have not handled the relationship between the two. For example, when training, because I want to do the movements well, my whole body is tense...... As a result, the strength of the prime mover muscle was not used against the barbell dumbbells, but it was all on the antagonist...... This leads to internal friction, reduces strength, and even increases the risk of injury.

The curl is quite simple, with a prime mover (two heads) and an antagonist muscle (three heads), which is relatively easy to deal with. But if it's squats, deadlifts, high flips, snatches or something, it's troublesome...... Multi-joint comprehensive movements such as squats, bench presses, deadlifts, etc., require a large number of muscle groups to participate in these multi-joint and large muscle groups, hundreds of prime mover muscles and antagonist muscles all over the body, all of which must be dealt with within one second...... This requires good muscle force sensation and neural integration.

2. Chest training, to warm up the back?

Fortunately, most fitness training sessions generally only target one large muscle group of prime mover muscles at a time. For example, chest training, back training, leg training, etc. The purpose of this type of training is mainly to sculpt the body shape and figure. The study found that if the "antagonist" movement is used as a warm-up movement first, the strength increase (maximum output power) and training effect during formal training will increase.

For example, in one experiment, researchers found that compared to doing 40kg of barbell explosive bench press throws alone, if the antagonist rowing training was performed first, the total power output of the subjects increased by as much as 4.7% (1). Another study published at the 2011 NSCA conference showed that if a 6-second biceps femoris leg curl (antagonist of the prime mover quadriceps muscle during jumping) is performed before jumping training, the strength of the athlete's quadriceps muscle will increase by about 15% in the subsequent jumping training (2).

  3. How to warm up the antagonist muscles?

So, how should we do this warm-up in actual training?

First of all, you should choose the same trajectory, the opposite direction of force, activate with a small weight, several times. For example, bench press and rowing can warm up as a group.

Assuming that you are training your chest today, and the main training movement is bench press, then you can use sitting rowing or barbell rowing as one of the warm-up movements. Assuming you are training your back today, and the main training movement is rowing, then you can use the bench press as one of the warm-up movements before training your back. At the same time, although the examples of actions we give are relatively simple to understand. However, during the bench press, it is not only the pectoralis major muscle group that exerts force, but also the triceps, anterior deltoid muscle and so on.

So, you should do more than just warm up the lats (not even the main ones). You should also warm up for antagonist muscles such as the posterior deltoid fascicle, scapular muscle group, trapezius muscle, etc.

Therefore, movements such as face pulling that target the posterior deltoid muscle and upper back muscles are also very suitable as a warm-up for chest training. Face pull is suitable for the posterior deltoid muscle and upper back muscle group in actual operation, choose 2-3 movements each time, do 1 set of each movement, and perform 20-30 small and medium-sized weight loads per group to stimulate.

In addition, antagonist warm-up movements can be interspersed with prime mover warm-up movements. For example, on chest training days, first do 20 small weight dumbbell bench presses→ 20 sitting rows→ 20 dumbbell bench presses→ 20 barbell rows, 20 barbell bench presses→ 20 →face pulls, and then do formal sets.