For all types of exercise, your warm-up activities should: Take each of the joints through full range of motion. Increase body temperature. Get you psychologically tuned to what your body will be doing. Physiological reasons for warming up. Warm-ups help the body and its muscles to perform more effectively by: Slowly increasing muscle temperature. Serving as a dry run, which alerts the individual to potential musculoskeletal and other problems that may occur at higher intensity. Reducing the risk of exercise-related heart problems by increasing coronary blood flow. Improving the elasticity of soft tissues. Preventing early lactic-acid buildup and fatigue. Stimulating motor units of the muscles in preparation for a heavier workload.

The original lyrics are deconstructed and reassembled at will by a rapper riding shotgun on the groove. Fitness is a stressandexercise and stressandexercise good thing to have in your life. The instructor--a striking woman dressed in an oversized black T-shirt and baggy black sweatpants, with a shock of braids tied up overhead--glides effortlessly to the right in an intricate sequence of hip-hop dance steps. The 30-odd students behind her mimic each move to a T. “Turn it, turn it!” she yells, and everyone reverses field. “Grapevine! Do it!” Only by screaming into a handheld mike can she momentarily raise her voice above the music. “Grapevine, grapevine! One more, one more! Five, six, seven . . . Whe-e-e-e-e-e-e-w! All right!” After 10 minutes stressandexercise of this, the instructor stops the tape. By now her students are sweating rivers and sucking wind, but they appear to be having the time of their life.

And average gym-goers, who juggle work, family and other responsibilities--how stressandexercise would you feel about an all-in-one workout for building muscle and improving your cardiorespiratory capacity? As a personal trainer, the first thing I have my clients do when I meet them for their workouts is warm up. And when I teach any type of aerobics class or even a body toning class, we don''t jump right into the high-intensity stuff -- we warm up first. Walking from your car to the stressandexercise gym does not count as warming up. If you''re getting the drift, you probably realize that warming up is crucial to every type of workout, and any sport, for that matter.

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