The Total Trainer home gym’s functionality allows it to be of valuable service even when not being utilized for workout purposes. While often the center point of gravity resistance strength training lifts, this machine chips in during the warm-up phase as well. This supporting role adds another feature to the Total Trainer, upgrading the quality of our ensuing cardio or strength work on standalone equipment.
Jumping into anything cold turkey is an unwise venture, and the world of fitness is no exception to this non-negotiable rule. First and foremost, part of the upside of warming up can be found in the name, which contains insight into the benefit it imparts. It will get the blood flowing to our muscles, increasing their temperature and literally “warming up” the body along the way. Beginning your routine with cold muscles can raise the chances of injury and prospect of subpar performance. Taking the time to warm them up banishes the muscle stiffness that can prohibit us from reaching full potential.
Getting the oxygen circulating and blood flowing through our system is a basic justification for adoption of a warm-up routine, building up the body’s capacity to take the pounding and stress it is bound to receive during exercise. Five to fifteen minutes of warming up is a reasonable trade-off to make for lowering injury chances; taking this time to slowly build up the intensity of exercises will get the body up to the task of handling heavy workloads. The raising of our heart rate is another valuable contribution made by warming up: elevating it prior to our next cardio workout ensures it is handled with flying colors.
The Total Trainer will be of further assistance if you would like to stretch prior to working out. Just be sure to put off the stretching routine until warm-ups are complete; muscles need to be warm prior to beginning your static stretches.
Warm-ups on the Total Trainer also help our range of motion; limber and flexible muscles will be soon to follow. The low impact exercises and adjustable resistance levels provided by Total Trainers make them an ideal mechanism for warming the body up.
To illustrate how these home gyms prepare our bodies and promote higher quality workouts, take the example of warming up before your session on the bench press. Let’s say you want to max out on your bench press and are looking to get muscles up to the task before attempting this feat. The Total Trainer fits this bill perfectly, allowing you to get your chest and arms ready thanks to their Twin Handle attachments. You can lie on your back, set the amount of resistance to a low portion of your body weight, then engage in a set of chest presses.
Dual Leg Cuffs allow the legs to be warmed up before lower body workouts. Furthermore, the four Pilates Resistance Bands on the Pilates System model ease you into the more difficult stages of a lower body exercise regimen. These will get the blood flowing and the leg’s range of motion calibrated for an impactful lower body workout.
The benefits of warming up on your Total Trainer extend as much to the psychological realm as they do to the physical. It will let us bring our mental preparedness to a higher plane while we ease into the intense work that lies ahead. Keener mental focus and an enhanced ability to concentrate on the task at hand stem from a Total Trainer warm-up session. These can amount to a “walk-through” or dress rehearsal of sorts, letting us get the steps down at a less challenging tempo and poundage, going through a mental checklist before the full exercise is undertaken.
As previously mentioned, jumping into any activity without preparation is unwise; this will be a recipe for falling short when the task at hand is sure to be a challenge. So be sure to get your body ready beforehand, warming up in direct proportion to the difficulty of the activity soon to follow. And the best part is that this does not need to be a drawn out process, as ten to fifteen minutes of heart rate increasing and circulation-promoting activity should put you in a position to more effectively perform the physical activity that lies ahead.
Warm-up exercises are a close cousin to those done for purposes of “cooling down.” Each of these serves a distinct purpose, helping our body build up to and unwind from our regimens, constituting beneficial bookends to any productive workout routine.
The Total Trainer home gym further demonstrates its capacity to make our fitness all that it can be when showing off an ability to properly warm up our muscles.