5-minute Exercise Warm Up for Older Adults

We're going to start with our warm-up. Every time you exercise, you should always warm up before you start doing strength exercises. How's everybody feeling? Great. You guys ready to go? Yep. Let's start with our warm-up. Here we go. So we're going to start with a march. And so what we're doing is we're warming up the muscles and getting the blood flowing, raising the heart rate just a little bit. So you want to start out slow and then you can just pick it up as you want to. So we're going to march for four, three, two more, and get ready. We're going to take it right to a step touch right now. Here we go. Step touch. Now when you're doing your warm-up, if you don't do it exactly like I do, that's okay. Because all we're doing is warming up those muscles. So you want to have good posture, abs in, shoulders back, and head up. We're going to do four more, guys. And three. Last two. We're going to take it back to a march. So march it right here. March it out. And we're going to do four, three, two. Hold it right there. Feet are steady. Your feet should be shoulder distance apart. Take the arms up. Loosening up the shoulders now. So take it up and down. Take it up and down. Can you guys feel that everything's starting to loosen up a little bit? Here we go. Let's do five more. And four. Last three. Two more. And one. Now what I want you to do is I want you to reach back. Make sure your chair is behind you. And you're going to have a seat. Now what we're going to do is we're going to warm up the quads now. So you're going to have your arms out and just stand it up and take it down. And stand it up and take it down. Stand it up. How are you guys doing back there? Okay, now you should feel your legs starting to warm up. And let's just do four more. What you do in your warm-up, a lot of times you'll do exercises or your warm-up will resemble the exercises that you're going to do later. So you're warming up those muscles. Here we go. This is the last one. Take it down. Keep that seated position. Take your hands. Put it right on the sides of the chairs. Take your legs out. They should be shoulder width apart. So go ahead, Grisel, take the feet just a little bit wider. A little bit wider. There you go. Now we're going to point the toes. This is warming up your calves and your ankles. So stretch and flex. Stretch and flex. Let's do three more. And two. And last one. You can feel your calf, you know. Yeah, good job. That's great. Now, does everybody feel pretty warm? Yeah. Okay, now if you need a little bit more time to warm up, you can always take a couple extra minutes. But we're going to go ahead and start our strength and balance exercises. The first thing we're going to do is arm curls. And we're going to do 10 of them. Grisel and Jerry are going to be our modifiers. And what they're going to do is they're going to stay in a seated position. The rest of you, we're going to grab our weights. And we're going to turn around. Now you want your feet to be shoulder distance apart. Pull your feet to be shoulder distance apart. Pull your shoulders back, abs in, head is up. Elbows should be tight to the side. And take it up for an arm curl. We're going to do 10 of these. Here we go. And two, three. Now, if you feel it getting a little bit hard, you want to be sure that you continue to breathe. And you want to breathe on the upward movement, the exertion. We've got two more. How are you guys doing? We're good. Your form looks good. Now, if you ever want to practice, and that's good. Now, shake out those shoulders just for a second. The next exercise is the overhead arm raise. You want to have your arms. Let me just check everybody out. You want to have your arms in 90 degree angles or a goalpost position. So take it up. And you can use different things when you're doing this. You can use, you know, soup cans, water bottles. I'm using dumbbells. Here we go. We've got five more.