Volleyball Pre Workout Routine

A volleyball players pre workout routine is extremely important. The majority of the time when an athlete gets injured early in practice or a workout is because they did not warm up properly. Athletes should NOT be rushing their warm up. The purpose of a warm up is to deliver more blood to your periphery (muscles), improve your mobility, activate your muscles, and help improve various structural and muscular imbalances in your body.

An athlete that regularly neglects doing a proper warm up ends up being the stiff, rigged, robotic moving athlete. Volleyball players need to be free flowing, fluid moving athletes.

Lets break down the components to make the perfect warm up:

GENERAL MOVEMENT COMPONENT

The first four minutes is dedicated to a general movement warm up. Examples are jogging, skipping, biking, etc… This portion of your warm is at a low to moderate intensity. The focus is increasing the blood flow from the central aspects of your body to the periphery (your muscles). You can also include some myofascial release exercises (foam rolling, lacrosse ball smashing, etc..) before the general movement component of the warm up, however we are not going to focus on that in this blog.

DYNAMIC STRETCHING COMPONENT

The second portion of the warm up is dynamic stretching. Dynamic stretching just means stretching with movement. Some examples are walking lunges, leg swings, hip hinging movements, etc…. The focus of the dynamic stretching is getting your joints primed to be able to workout/practice safely and effectively.

Regularly performing good quality dynamic stretches will improve your overall mobility which has many performance enhancing and injury preventative benefits. Many athletes can not squat or deaflift properly because their posture and mobility is so poor that they always get into a compromised position. This increases an athletes risk of getting injured in the weight room or on the court/sand. An example of this is when a volleyball player is in passing/defensive posture for a prolonged period of time and also has tight hamstrings. The tight hamstrings pulls on the pelvis and puts the athletes back posture in a compromised position. The athlete is then complaining of lower back pain for the next couple of weeks. This is one of many scenarios that could have been avoided by regularly doing dynamic stretches.

In this blog we are going to spend the majority of our time focusing on the dynamic stretching component. You are going to get access to an entire dynamic stretching routine with video tutorials that you can add into training immediately. I am also including a few essential muscle activation exercises.

NEUROLOGICAL, MUSCLE ACTIVATION COMPONENT

The last component of your warm up routine focuses on priming your neurological system to be ready to lift weights, practice, etc… The focus is getting your muscles activated as much as possible. Essentially what we are doing is waking up the fast twitch muscle fibers so that they are activated before we start the actual workout/practice. I like to include some progressive speed and agility drills in this component. An example would be various ladder drills where the athlete is doing specific foot work patterns. Start off at moderate intensity and gradually increase the speed of the foot work patterns to work your way up to a maximum intensity. Other exercises that you can include in this portion of the warm up is low intensity kettlebell swings, goblet squats, band work, and/or some simple isometric holds (planking variations).

Get instant access to an incredible volleyball specific dynamic stretching routine that you can add to your warm up so that you can be the fluid moving athlete. This is 100% free by simply subscribing. If you have already subscribed check your email because I have already sent you the routine. Here is what you are getting:

Printable Dynamic Stretching Guide

 VIDEO PORTFOLIO CONTAINING TWELVE DIFFERENT EXERCISES