Fire Up Your CNS and Develop Power With These 3 Upper Body Primers

During the first few phases of any good warm-up, one of the main priorities should be to get into a parasympathetic state to chill the body out and allow for positive movement adaptations to occur. Before you begin training, however, you want to dig yourself out of that parasympathetic hole in order to perform. ⁣

The key to doing so? Move fast and powerfully. It doesn’t matter who you are; everyone should be doing some kind of explosive movement before training. There are two main reasons why power work so critical: ⁣

1. It primes the CNS to tap into a heightened pre-training state. This means stronger lifts, more efficient movement under load, and improved motor control. ⁣

2. Power work does what its name suggests: it develops power. This is important for a variety of reasons – bigger lifts, accelerated muscle gain, fat loss, etc. Plus, the ability to exert force quickly (as opposed to the ability to exert force in general) is imperative for performance as well as real life – think, catching yourself (or not) before a fall.

In other words, being able to move fast might be the difference between a minor scrape and a broken wrist. Pretty important, right?⁣

These are three of my favorite variations to be done prior to training the upper body:

-MB throw/chest pass to ground
-Tall kneeling MB chest pass
-Drop plyo push-up

The key is maximal intent, not volume. 2-3 sets of 3-8 reps is all it takes. Stimulate, don’t annihilate!