RAMP up your dance warm up

By now most dancers and teachers know the importance of warming up prior to dance, however knowing that you should do something and knowing how to do something are two different things. Likewise, dancers and teachers understand that sitting in the splits or propping your leg up on the barre isn’t adequate to prepare your body for the demands of dance, but if these don’t count as a warm-up, what exactly does?

Enter, the RAMP protocol. It was designed by Ian Jeffreys and is used by elite athletes and coaches around the world. Following this simple formula can take the guess work out of designing your warm-up and ensure you’re not missing any key elements.

1. Raise your heart rate. Choose cardio based activities such as jogging on the spot, jumping jacks, high knees, carioca’s etc that will increase muscle temperature, raise core temperature, increase blood flow to the muscles and stimulate neural activation. This part of the warm-up should be a minimum of 5 minutes, but ideally more like 10-15 minutes to get the heart rate raised sufficiently.

2. Activate your muscles. Engage your muscles in preparation for the upcoming activity. Choose movements that incorporate multiple muscle groups like squats, walking lunges, inch worms, bear crawls, fire hydrants etc. You can vary the difficulty and complexity of these movements to tailor it to different levels of dancers.

3. Mobilize your joints. Focus on dynamic mobility and movement patterns which will be used in the upcoming dance session. This could include movements such as spinal roll downs, hip circles, dynamic hamstring and calf stretches, ankle push-overs etc. Avoid sustained passive stretching as part of your warm-up.

4. Potentiate (practice) your skills. This is your chance to put it all together and practice any dance specific skills that you need in order to feel confident going on stage. This may include things like lifts, turns, jumps or specific balances that appear in your choreography. This is also your chance to practice any flexibility skills that weren’t included in the mobilize section – just ensure you’re not holding passive stretches for more than 30sec to avoid any decrease in muscle power associated with sustained passive stretching.

There are many different approaches to creating a comprehensive warm-up. Some teachers  choreograph a ‘warm-up dance’ to a specific song(s) at the beginning of a season and use it for months (or a whole year). Others switch it up daily. Some dancers have a specific warm-up that they use for certain genres of dance (ie ballet vs acro) while others prefer the consistency of it being the same every time.

There’s no one right way to warm-up. As long as you’re covering the 4 major areas outlined above - and achieving the goal of raising core temperature, increasing blood flow to the muscles and stimulating neural activation – you’ll be good to go!

Questions or comments? Leave them below.