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Today’s movement will usually appear in the Movement Preparation portion of your Strength and Flexibility workouts. Movement Preparation prepares your body for movement using dynamic movements to activate muscles. This movement will increase your heart rate and core temperature and increase blood flow to your muscles. Perform five to 10 repetitions to help improve your performance and decrease your risk of injury.

Coaching Instructions:

[1] Stand tall with your arms at your sides.

[2] Lift one foot off the ground and squat back and down a few inches with the other leg.

[3] Contracting the glute of your standing leg, grab below your opposite knee with your hands and pull your knee to your chest while straightening your other leg. Hold for 1 to 2 seconds.

[4] Relax and return to the starting position.

[5] Repeat the movement with your other leg.

[6] Continue alternating to complete the set.

Coaching Tips: Keep your chest up and contract the glute of the standing leg.

Feel It: Stretching your glutes, hamstrings, and hip flexors.

By Scott Quill, Athletes' Performance

Have you ever thought of running as jumping and landing thousands of times in a single workout, oftentimes while moving at top speed? When you think of it this way, touching your toes and just starting out slow hardly seems like a sufficient warm-up.

A better approach includes activating the muscles you’ll use in your miCoach workout during a dynamic warm-up. We call it Movement Preparation, or Movement Prep, because it prepares your body to move.

“You’ll increase your core body temperature, elongate muscles, and activate key areas for running,” says Craig Friedman, vice president of the Performance Innovation Team at Athletes’ Performance.

This series of movements also benefits your body on a neurological level, Friedman says. It opens the pathways your brain uses to send messages to your muscles and also helps ingrain proper movement patterns. Simply put, this makes you a more efficient runner.

Here are four more ways Movement Prep will make you better:

1. Movement Prep helps balance your body

Every time your foot hits the ground, your body has to rebalance itself. Training your balance dynamically with Movement Prep will prepare you to do this.

2. Movement Prep improves flexibility

You’ll develop new ranges of motion by actively elongating and contracting muscles. Initially, this gets rid of stiffness. Stay consistent with your Movement Prep routine and you’ll maintain your newfound flexibility better.

3. Movement Prep creates symmetry in your stride

Either a lack of mobility or stability in your body can lead to an asymmetrical stride length where one limb is compensating for another. This typically leads to decreased performance, pain or injury. Movement Prep helps clear up these asymmetries.

4. Movement Prep boosts power, strength and endurance

You’ll move more efficiently, which means you’ll cover more distance with the same amount of effort and energy, and you can push off the ground with more power in every stride.

Get Moving

Spend a few minutes doing Movement Prep at the start of your next miCoach workout. To add a Movement Prep routine to your training plan, go to Training Plans, choose your training, and then click on the link that says “customize your plan with single workouts.” Choose a warm-up that includes 5 to 10 minutes of Movement Prep.