Once you make the decision to work out, you may be tempted to skip your warmup and jump right into things. If you’re short on time or patience, here’s one move for a whole body warmup you might like – a barefoot sumo squat.
With this one compound exercise, you warm up several major muscle groups, get yourself in good alignment, AND work to correct any poor postural habits you sink into during your day.
You can do this with your shoes on, but barefoot allows you to more easily achieve good foot alignment.
How to Do It
Start with a fairly shallow sumo squat and don’t go too deep to start. Take it up and down nice and easy, increasing your depth as you warm up. Pay attention to your form, starting with your feet. Here’s the sequence of your focus:
- Establish weight bearing through the tripod of the foot for better alignment of all of the joints above (knees, hips, and all the way up to the shoulders). I’ve included an extra video below that goes into more depth about the tripod of the foot.
- Warm up the muscles of the legs, including the quads and hamstrings.
- Engage the glutes and promote external rotation of the hips.
- Activate the abdominals and other core muscles as you work to establish and maintain a neutral pelvic tilt.
- Stretch the front of your shoulders and move the shoulder joint into a neutral position.
- Cue the lower trapezius and upper back muscles to help position the scapula (shoulder blade) for good shoulder mechanics.
That sounds like a lot to keep track of, right? Follow along with this video and see how it can easily become an automatic process.
While this one move for a whole body warmup is one of my favorites, you can also go through this sequence during your workout for great results as you add weights and/or depth to your sumo squat.
The Tripod of the Foot
Want to know more about working on weight-bearing through the ‘tripod of the foot’? Try this video:
For access to more videos like these, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.
Stay fit!
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