The warm-up

„The Warm-up“ is a warm-up structure we love to use.

What is „The Warm-up?“

The Warm-up has two guiding ideas:

  1. 1.
  2. You are coming to the practice from your „daily life“ which in almost all cases means a limited amount of movement diversity. That is clear for the person that works at a desk, but also if you are in a physical job your movements will be somewhat limited and repetitive. So use this time to move in all sorts of ways. With all sorts of qualities and all sorts of style. Move fast, move slow, move big, move small, move tensed, move relaxed. Do not think too much about exercises, if you can. That needs some practice but will eventually enable you to really move diversly instead of just hopping from one limited exercise to the next. The idea of „The Warm-up“ is to move as diversely as you can, to not stay longer with one move or position or exercise, but to constantly change what you are doing. This is the time to counterbalance the absence of movement diversity in our daily lives.
  3. 2.
  4. The second idea is that you do not know what is coming after the warm-up. So you warm-up for everything. A fight? A 20k run? Climbing? Dancing? Standing still for one hour? Learning brainy coordinations? Sleeping? Be ready for everything, warm-up in a way that you are ready for everything.

„The Warm-up“ is usually 15-30 minutes long. Often we are meeting in between and remind each other of what did we forget. Where can we put some extra focus on the next minutes?

The idea of the „Warm-up“ is triggered by the work of Martin Kilvady (the idea of „All Inclusive“).

„The Warm-up“ is usually done individually, partner work can be done but no one is explicitly telling you what to do exactly, it is an open warm-up, you improvise. „The Warm-up“ can be difficult for beginners, they can feel lost. In a sense that has more social reasons than anything else, because everbody actually knows how to move, but I acknowledge that and would often spare beginner groups from „The Warm-up“.

Joseph Bartz
2018