Read the transcript for this video:

Good morning and welcome to your Weekly Cup of Joe. My name is Joe King. I'm the owner of Physical Therapy Advantage here in North Aurora. I'm back in the clinic today. I'm going to record a couple of videos for a couple of the upcoming Cup of Joes. So one of the questions we get asked quite a bit in the clinic and out in the public is, "what's the difference between Static Stretching and Dynamic Stretching?" They're both good.  Is one better than the other. Like I said, they're both really good and they both have their place and they both have their benefits. So as PTs, we're pretty much biased that, yes, I think you need to do both, and I'm going to explain why here in these next two segments of Cup of Joe. Today we're going to talk about Dynamic Warmup or Dynamic Stretching.

Dynamic stretching is movement through your full range of motion that your body's allowed to prepare your body for an activity. So it's basically active stretching to prepare your body and it mimics the activity that you're going to be doing. So if you're going to be doing soccer, you want to prepare by doing some soccer type drills and warmups. If you're just gardening and doing some general exercise and general stuff, you can do some general dynamic stretches and we're going to go through a few of those. The benefits of dynamic warmup or dynamic stretching is it increases your blood flow, decreases your risk for injury, and it decreases muscle soreness after the activity. So one of the options you can do, is you can foam roll your lower body, upper body, different body parts; whatever you want to do before the activity, that's going to increase your blood flow to the area even more so it's going to increase the tissue extensibility and warm up those tissues even a little bit more to allow you to be better warmed up and then do your dynamic stretching, and then be able to have a great activity and hopefully not feel stiff and sore and like you can't move too much. So that's an option for you. One of the caveats to this is if you have an injury or you're coming off of an injury and you still may need to do one or two static stretches after you've done your dynamic warmup, just to target that specific area of injury, just to make sure it's nice and loose before you start your activity, which is okay too. Doesn't really matter. There is going to be a link below this and it's from Elite Health and Fitness out of Massachusetts. They're a sports performance and PT training Center, and I found it online. They do a really good job of explaining dynamic warmup, dynamic stretching. So there's a link below and they have a list of different ones and some pictures of some different ones that describe them.

So I'm going to take you through three of them that I like to do. They're generalized ones, but one for the back of the legs, and one more for the side and the hips. But they're really nice to do. So the first one we're going to do is called a "Tall Knee Hug", kind of like a knee to chest. Bear with me here I'm coming down and you end up going up on one leg. Bring your knee to your chest, pull it up, and you can even go up on your tippy toe. All right, I'll do that, going the other way too. Excellent! So the next one we going to show is pull a "Soldier March" and you'll see why it's called that; it hits the glutes and the hamstrings. Your legs don't have to be totally straight, but you're reaching out with opposite arm, opposite leg. And the last one is a "Lateral lunge". So facing one way, just taking a nice big side step and lunging one way, lunging back the other way, and then you pivot, lunge one way, then the other way. You take yourself through it again.

So those are three basic ones to do. They are on that link as well. Like I said, there are a few others, there are multiple to do. You can modify it for sports specifics as well, depending on the activity you're doing or if you want to do more of a generalized one, typically a dynamic warmup or dynamic stretching event or episode before your event should take you a minimum of five minutes, maybe up to 10-minutes. So don't go too long with it, but enough to get you warmed up. Obviously. If you have any questions about dynamic stretching or dynamic warmup, just please feel free to call. Don't hesitate at all. (630) 892-8003. If you have questions about the dynamic stretching or if you have just generalized health or physical therapy questions, we just want to be a resource for the community. So (630) 892-8003. Hope that explains a little bit more about dynamic stretching. Looking forward to next week, going to talk about static stretching and we'll conclude the little tutorial on this two-part series here like I said, hope you enjoy, check out the link below, and we'll see you next week for your Weekly Cup of Joe! Bye.