Your own positive future begins in this moment. All you have is right now. Every goal is possible from here.
–Lao Tzu
The difference between being a good athlete and a great athlete can be as little as 30 well spent minutes a day. It can be the difference between the guy that comes in and lifts cold and the guy that spends time warming up through the range of motion needed for the days training session. This sounds easy enough right? Well most of the time I get a “I just don’t have time after the workout to do this” and here is my response:
- 24 hours in a day
- Ideally 8 spent sleeping
- Around 8 at your desk job
- 2 hours (give or take) for food prep and cooking
- 1 hour getting ready for work
- 2 hours for a workout (which includes warm-up)
- 1-2 hours of misc. stuff (just for purposes of this post)
- This leaves you with one hour of left over time, or crazy thought, mobilization time.
But the truth is, it honestly depends on if you want to get better. If you are happy with where you are at, with your current numbers/abilities, and with your overall performance, then you do you.
But if you want to get better, to be able to do more, to get to that next PR or keep injury free, then maybe this is something you should try and fit in day to day.
That being said, the following took about 15 minutes this morning and would serve as a great pre-work mobilization option for those that want to start fitting in some flexy time.
Start with a foam roller and go over each of the following areas for 10-15 passes (making sure to pay special attention to any areas that might be a little tighter than others).
- Upper back with arms down
- Upper back with arms up
- Lower back
- Both Shoulders
- Both Lats.
- Glutes
- IT Bands (great time for a coffee break during the roll)
- Quads (rolling on the inner, outer, and middle of the leg)
- Hamstrings
- Calves (this one is always a little painful for me, so I take some extra time to give them a little more love)
After the rolling and mashing, we move to some borrowed yoga poses to increase our range of motion in specific areas. I like to try and hold the poses for at least 30 seconds if not more (and feel free to go through these two or three times depending on the amount of time you have available):
- Reclined Hero’s (My quads and hips flexors are extremely tight due to the increase in my volume recently, so I use this as my test pose for my morning flex practice)
- Childs pose
- Thread the needle (on both sides)
- Cat/Cow (Go through this series at least 5 times)
- Downward dog (walking the heels out for a calf stretch)
- Downward dog (focusing on driving your head through)
- Forward fold
- Forward fold (focusing on wrist mobility)
- Garland pose
- Cobbler pose
- Seated forward fold
- Reclined Hero’s (test to see if you have increase ROM in your target area for the day)
As you can see, 15 minutes can do wonders for your body, and is not as hard to come by as some make it seem (you just have to MAKE time, not FIND it).
PURE HEALTH PERFORMANCE 