Warm Ups

Transcript - Warm Ups

It's important that you understand the importance of your warm up. Everybody knows that you want to get your body limber, get your heart rate up a little bit. That makes training easier and safer, reduces the number of injuries.

There are more important aspects to the warm-up as well. You'll notice that most of the time when we warm up at JMAC, we're doing a call-and-response form of training. We're warming up our knees, we're warming up our hips, and the instructors are going, "Ichi, ni, san, shi!" — students are going "Go, roku, shichi, hachi!"

Here's the key: when you come in for that, you really don't want to be daydreaming or just phoning it in while you warm up. That's a really important few moments to take yourself from the kind of level that you walk around at all day to another higher level — just like we hope we did with the mokusou — and to stay there, to keep increasing your energy, to increase your focus, increase your commitment. If the nervous system's activated, then you're going to learn more, you're going to pick up more, people around you are going to soak up your energy, and we're all going to train at a higher level.

How you do anything is how you do everything, and doing the warm ups with all of yourself, with your energy, counting out loud, and really moving your body, getting your mind engaged and really committing to the warm ups is gonna be a determining factor for how well you learn, and what you get out of the rest of the class.

In the next video I'm going to just talk to you a little bit about the importance of attendance. As I will say, you only get better at the things that you commit your time and energy to, and attendance, coming to class regularly and often, is really critical, so I'll share a few thoughts on that next time we meet.