It's Getting Hot In Here: An Easy Warmup Exercise To Help You Feel Toasty

I’m a HUGE fan of rocking for a variety of reasons:

• It’s easy but can be progressed to feel more challenging
• It helps reestablish better posture
• It integrates your upper body with the lower body
• It’s super safe
• It’s soothing (you rock babies to sleep after all, right?)
• AND, it really gets the blood pumping, gets your core temperature up and helps you forget, even if only momentarily, that it’s cold outside.

Here's a video showing you how it's done:

Let's break it down:

1. Get onto your hands and knees, hands right under shoulders, knees right under hips.
2. Look up with your eyes and keep your tongue on the roof of your mouth; breath in and out through your nose.
3. Don’t think about bringing your belly button to your spine here, just let your belly hang :)
4. Rock your hips back toward your feet (toes can be tucked or pointed, up to you) and then rock forward. Make sure you’re not holding your breath.

You can play with the direction you go in (you don’t have to go forwards and backwards, you can also go side to side, in a circle, diagonally; go nuts!).

You can play with tempo (go slowly or quickly).

You can play with taking one limb off the floor while you rock (so, for example, reach one arm straight out in front of you and do a few slow rockbacks and then switch arms; does it feel different from one side to another? You can also do this reaching one leg straight back. You get the idea.)

You can also lift your knees off the ground an inch and slowly go back and forth (again, make sure you’re breathing!). The first time I did this variation, my quads were so sore!

The rockback is also a great, safe way to either warm up your squat pattern or to reestablish your squat if your body’s had a really hard time getting into that position during training sessions.

Rockbacks can be really great to help with mobility in arthritic knees, hips or shoulders! Don’t go into pain but slowly play with the range of motion you can manage. If you have tender knees, make sure there’s padding underneath them and if kneeling on the floor is still too much, elevate yourself by placing your hands on a steady chair or bench and your knees off the ground.

In terms of how to incorporate this into your own workout, there are a few things you can do: 

• Use it as part of your warmup
• Do a variation between sets
• Use it to pattern your squat before doing them
• Or just do them on their own any time you get a break to move around a little! (And if you don't "have" time in your day, make time. You only need a minute or two!)

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So play on and warm up, friends!