The four minute warm up, and the four pieces in it

The four pieces

Two of the four minutes. Slowly, breathing, and never into pain. Each one has its own page with what it is for and the three ways it goes wrong.

Open the front of the hips

Half kneeling, squeeze the back glute, hold and breathe.

Reach overhead

Back to a wall, arms slide up. Stop before the ribs flare.

Rotate through the middle

Seated, turn and look behind you. Both ways, slowly.

Ankles over toes

Knee travels past the toes with the heel down. Both sides.

Then one light set

Of whatever leads the session. A light set is part of the warm up, not part of the work, and it is the single best predictor of whether the first working set goes well.

What goes wrong

Three faults, each written as the fix.

It turns into a workout

Four minutes, and two of them are the mobility. If the warm up is tiring you it has stopped being one and started eating the session it was meant to protect.

It is dropped on a short day

The short day is the day it matters most, because a short session is a dense one. Twenty minutes with a warm up beats twenty five without.

It is held static and hard

These are movements, not stretches to hang in. Slowly, breathing, to the first point of real resistance and back.

When it is longer

Eight minutes rather than four, when a safety answer asked for it or when the decades have earned it: walk, then the four pieces, then one light set of everything rather than of one thing. An MDRN plan makes that decision for you and prints the one it made, so the number on your own plan is the number to follow.

Each piece, on its own

• Open the front of the hipsSitting holds the front of the hip short for eight hours a day. Everything that asks the hip to extend, which is standing up, walking and every hinge, then borrows the range from the lower back instead.
• Reach overheadPressing anything overhead needs the ribs to stay down while the arms go up. A desk teaches the opposite, so the ribs flare and the shoulder runs out of room before the arm is vertical.
• Rotate through the middleThe spine is built to rotate and almost nothing in a modern day asks it to. What is lost there gets taken from the lower back and the shoulders, which are both worse at it.
• Ankles over toesA squat needs the knee to travel forward over the foot, and an ankle that will not allow it is the commonest reason heels lift and chests drop. It is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.

The longer version

• The six movements a week of training actually needsPush, pull, hinge, squat, carry, brace. Every useful strength programme is a rearrangement of these six, and you can do all of them in a front room with no equipment.
• Is two sessions a week enough?Yes, if two is what survives a bad week. The honest case for a smaller plan, and why four days often produces less than two.