MoveWell x Exhale Coffee - Rituals 1 'Prepare While you Brew'

Prepare While you Brew

Introducing Exhale Coffee - these guys roast ridiculously healthy coffee!   Their coffee is sustainably sourced with proven health and performance benefits.  Sound good?  We thought so.  In support of their journey we have teamed up with Exhale to produce a series of short edits that highlights ways of using your 4-5 mins brewing time to better your body.

In the first of our Rituals | While you Brew mini series MoveWell co-founder, Physio and personal trainer Henry gives us some ideas on how you might best use your brewing time to prepare for physical activity. This example would work particularly well for a runner but could be easily adapted or used as it is for almost any sport or physical activity. 

We all know it's a good idea to warm up pre exercise and many of us also enjoy a pre-workout Coffee, so combining the two and making use of the 3-4mins recommended brewing time prior to physical activity has got to be a win, right? 

Lets get to it…A warm up should replicate the activity you're going to do, so typically speaking doing the movement patterns (and where appropriate skills) with gradually increasing intensity is a good way to go. Here we are looking not just at warming up but also at physical and mental preparation. While all the goodness and flavour in your exhale coffee is doing its thing, it is the perfect time to get moving and prepare both your body and mind for your activity.

As a Physio I often talk to my clients (everyone from sedentary adults through to Olympians) about the power of consistency and utilising warm up and recovery time to not just get warm but to also incorporate rehab or specific conditioning exercises. In Physio terms we might call this micro-dosing, small blocks of a movement or conditioning that start to add up over time and also help prep for the activity immediately ahead.

So, the coffee is brewing, depending on your chosen brewing method you've got a few mins. What do you do? Here are my thoughts for a good starting point. Grab a Sphere or one of our other natural Cork self-myofacial release products and throw the Anywhere Mat on the deck. For me I feel bang for buck with the glute and plantar-fascia rolling I've done in the video. Don't spend long on this, 30-60 seconds massaging will have a short term effect on range of motion that you can build into and can be useful to desensitise tissues and get moving. Give it a try. Next up using an Activation band I’m doing Monster Steps and Glute bridges to activate or load up the muscles around my hips and trunk to gradually prepare the tissues for more intense loading during exercise or sport.

These movements might be part of a broader group of exercises that I might do or recommend for conditioning throughout the week but are perfect here in combination with some mental preparation perhaps through visualisation (in my mind i'm cruising along a ridge line) to prepare for the Run or activity ahead. See what works for you…Ok, Coffee time…..Lets Go!