Why You Shouldn\'t Skip the Warm-Up and Stretching in Insanity Workout?

In this post I am going to describe two essential exercises in every Insanity workout, in which you should not underestimate its importance for your own safety first, and in order to perform the workouts in the most efficient way, they are the warm up and the cool down stretching.

Warm-up:

Put it this way, I am a 20 years old male, and while doing the exercise in the warm-up I checked my heart rate and it was 165 bpm (beats per minute) this is according to medical facts is about 85% of my total max heart rate, and believe it or not I was still in the warm-up phase, the real exercises did not even begin yet. During the real workouts itself, I took a lot of rests in the middle, but that is completely normal for anyone if he is doing the exercise for the first time, as the instructor (Shaun T) says.

The following bullets mention the plyometric cardio circuit warm up exercises, you do these exercises 3 times, no brakes in the middle, and make sure that you begin slowly, then each time you complete this interval you push yourself more, until you reached the 3rd interval when you push yourself to the maximum.

• Jog
• Jumping Jacks
• Heisman's
• 123
• Butt Kicks
• High Knees
• Mummy Kicks

After you have completed these 3 intervals, you should be pouring a lot of sweat, and that's the main goal of the warm-up, is to prepare your muscles and lean them for the insane following exercises, in order to prevent injury. You can take now a sip of water for 30 seconds, but remember that you should not stop moving.

Cool Down stretching:

The second part in this brief post is the cool down stretching, many people overlook this part of the workout or don't do it right, but I think it is a very essential exercise after the intense exercises you do in Insanity workout. It is medically advised that if you are doing some sort of intense exercise for a long period of time, it's not good that after you finish that you immediately stop.

Many people think that stretching is only important before you do an exercise, but stretching should be done before and after the workout. Stretching is important to prevent cramps in your muscles, because after you exercise your muscles are very warm, and the muscles cannot immediately return to its normal temperature, it takes time, and in this time you should do some sort of soft exercise, and not just because stretching is an easy part of the workout that it should be skipped.