Whatever you want to refer to it as Intention, Attention to Detail, or The Small Things, doesn’t change the value of being there in the moment. Each day we start class we do a very general warmup. The goal here is to get the body ready to move, establish and grow safe movement patterns, and incept athletes with some reps of very basic movements.
I am not claiming that this is the end all be all best warmup around, but I do know that it gets the job done. I have seen a decent amount of people do this warmup over the past year or so since we instituted this in class, and I can definitely see athletes improving and moving better. I have seen pushups go from flared out elbows to elbow tucked in close to the ribcage, I have seen knee pushups become toe pushups, I have seen squat depth increase by multiple inches, while not sacrificing lumbar position, and many, many other things.
I am as guilty as the next person of not always using the warmup as well as I can. Sometimes the pace is a bit lazy and less intentioned. This doesn’t do any justice for our bodies. I wanted to call attention to this, because every once in awhile an athlete has impeccable effort on the things that some will slack on. Fast feet may be the most guilty of them all. If you haven’t seen Nick King do this, I got him to do a video, I can’t believe how fast his feet go.
If we start to value the little things and we start to do these well, imagine what could happen to the big things. I am pretty sure they would start to get better, as well. We always talk about this skill transfer thing. Doing pushups well leads to handstand pushups, doing fast feet well.. what does that lead to? Well I don’t know, maybe its time for us all to find out.
Thanks, Nick! You rock!
Danny Lesslie
@dannylesslie
8/20/14 WOD
AMRAP 15
3 Power Cleans (185/125)
3 rounds:
5 Pull Ups
10 Push Ups
15 Squats