¬10 exercises for your Posterior Chain
Warming up in my professional opinion is without a doubt the most important thing you can do before exercising. I realized this about 10 years ago when I first embarked on my Kettlebell journey. We had a certified kettlebell coach teaching a boot camp once a week at my old gym SoCal MMA. The coach was insistent that I use a heavy weight because I wan an MMA fighter and a man. Even though I had zero kettlebell training, I listened to him. After every class, my lower back was killing me! I thought to myself, “I must be doing something wrong.” After a few classes I realized that it wasn’t me, it was the lack of a good, solid warm up!
Our warm up consisted of halos with 16kg bells and swings. Not the ideal warm up when you are about to engage in any type of kettlebell training. I eventually took over the KB boot camp at my gym and made warming up a priority. In the 10 years that I have been training with kettlebells, I have narrowed it down to the 2 areas of the bodies that endure the most injuries. These areas are the lower back, and the shoulders.
The kettlebell swing is an explosive exercise that emphasizes your posterior chain. Your lower back is a crucial part of this chain. If you injure your back, it is extremely painful and uncomfortable. When your lower back is injured, walking, bending over, getting out of bed and just about everything you do will be painful. It is my number one priority that all of my clients stay injury free. If any of my students leave my gym injured, then I failed them as a coach. I can not have that on my conscience.
I know the name Kettle-Jitsu may be misleading. People may assume its just about kettlebell training. But, in my programs, body weight is just as important as kettlebell. In fact, in my classes, it consists of 30 minutes of body weight and 30 minutes of kettlebell. This is the protocol I follow on all of my downloads. The first 30 minutes of body weight training are preparing you to work with the kettlebell in the last 30 minutes of the workout.
In the first 30 minutes of my classes, we focus on warming up our entire body with mobility, isometrics, core exercises, ab training and body weight training. There is a huge emphasis on warming up the posterior chain. That way, when we get to the body weight training, the chances of you getting any type of injury are miniscule.
The enclosed video contains 10 of the exercises we use in every class I teach. I even include these my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu classes! I urge you to implement these into your daily routine. Since these are body weight exercises, you can do them anywhere! You can even wake up in the morning and do these in your living room before work! Have a look at this video and try them out for yourself!