Chest Stretching Warm-Up

Hi all! We've made another addition to our warm-up series! Use this video to learn how to thoroughly and effectively stretch your chest before heavy upper-body exercise. Enjoy and good luck!

Below is the transcript for this video's dialogue. Use it to follow along or learn the specific terminology we use! Thanks for watching!

"Hi everyone, Gavin Ravens here from Miami Stretch Therapy here to do just a quick video with you about warming-up your chest properly doing a chest-heavy workout. So we’re going to use just a doorframe here. It’s going to be really simple. We’re going to go through a clockwork, literally a clockwork from 12 o’clock all the way down to 6 o’clock and hitting every hour in-between. That’s a good way to visualize and remember when you’re doing your warm-up to hit every single spot. So we’re going to make this real quick. Grab a doorframe. If you’re in the gym, you can use anything vertical with a right-angle that you can get your upper-body past and around and I’ll show you exactly what I mean by that. So first position, you’re going to have your arm straight up. Your leg, you’re going to step into the stretch. You’re going to lean into it and resist slightly with your arm. Keep your elbow straight. You also want to keep your shoulders and your hips facing forward. I’ll try it from the way so you can see it from the opposite side. My arm is strait up, my body is going to be about a foot away from the doorframe and I’m leaning in. Chest is facing forward, hips are facing forward. Sorry, that was the cat. Ok, and good. Take your arm down. Now you’re gonna want to do the same spot 2 or 3 times. You can also notice that I’m bending my knee a little in the back. I’m leaning into it a little more rather than try to stay up too strait. you want to create the fulcrum of pressure right here in your arm-pit. You can play with it al little bit. You can move in and out. And just for the video purpose, we’re going to keep moving along. And let’s go to 1 o’clock. Facing forward. And good, come on out of it. You can keep your arm up or take it down, it’s up to you. In the beginning it may get a little tired, fatigued easily, so maybe take it down. I’m pretty used to this one, so I’m going to keep going. Notice how I keep my arm straight and I’m my body is moving away from the door frame, but I’m keeping the same exact position as I lean into it. Good, I can actually come a little more forward now. Good. I’m holding my chest here to make sure my position isn’t going too far left or right. You can also hold on your hip if you like. Good and down to 3 o’clock. Now, see I switched my foot position here because I need more leverage here. I want to actually turn into it and I turn my body away a little bit. Now, when I do that I am turning my hips as well to get leverage on it. Because this is the strongest point in my chest. Yours might be a little different. You may be stronger up top or the lower part of your pectorals, but for me it’s the middle. So I turn into it a little bit, then rep it out like that. Good, drop it down. Now, this might seem a little time consuming, but take your time to stretch. Just warming it up in the beginning will have its benefits. You don’t want to do too much in the beginning, just maybe 1 to 3 times in each position to get the blood flow in there; wake the muscles up. And then after your workout feel free to do longer repetitions. You can hang-out in the stretch 10, 15, 20 seconds. Just keep easing into it, don’t bounce on it. And get a deeper stretch, focus on lengthening your muscles fibers rather than warming them up. Ok now I’m going to start doing the same thing, just kind of turn into it. In that angle. You can also just face your body this way and push into it. In the beginning you might be so tight that you’re right here and that you can’t really get anywhere past it, but just do your best to center up, push and as you get more advanced, you can rotate. And really use your legs to rotate. Good, we’re already down here at 5 o’clock. Which foot is forward does not necessarily matter. Except in this case where I’m pushing off with my left to get better traction on my stretch here. And we’re going to come all the way down to 6. About 6. And what I like to do on this one is tilt my head. You can try that one too as you push. And that’s going to light up your trapezius muscle here and even a little bit of your elevator scapulae muscle. Look that one up if you don’t know it, its a really important muscle. So that’s the full shoulder round. That’s it. Just repeat for the other side. Like I said, just do a little bit in the beginning. Stretch; focus on warming up in the beginning and then at the end of your workout, focus on stretching. Once again, I’m Gavin Ravens from Miami Stretch Therapy. Thanks for watching. Feel free to get in touch with and questions or comment that you may have. Thanks, have a great day and good luck."