It still amazes me after 15 years of being a personal trainer just how many people skip the warm-up when they workout. It is seen as an inconvenience and a waste of time by many who think they can get straight out of the car and right working out at full capacity. If you watch any professional athlete prepare for their match or event, you will find they NEVER skip their warm-up for they know how important it is to their performance. Not only is the warm up pivotal to their sporting success, it is vital in preventing any unwanted injury that could derail their career. What does a good warm up consist of? Well, this can vary on many factors, such as if it is for a sport, gym, what age you are, and what injuries you may have. To help guide you on selecting the right warm-up routine for your body, we will explain the key things each warm-up must include and we provide several specific examples of what it would look like. Enjoy

We all know that getting older is something we cannot change or avoid. We know that time will come when we just cannot move as fast as we did in our youth, and for some it may be in their 30's that they begin to feel some changes. But for most of us, it will be in our 40's that we notice many things that we just cannot do as easily as before. This is also why you rarely see professional sports people continue to play in their 40's and when they do, they are not the same formidable force they were in their previous years. Many of us who competed in sports all our life will have experienced a lot of wear and tear on muscles, joints, ligaments and tendons and the little aches and pains we bounced back from quickly, now seem to take a lot longer to recover from. Even how our body metabolizes and digests food changes in our 40's. Now this doesn't mean you need to give up, or avoid exercise, you just need to be aware of the necessary changes to your training and diet to accommodate the changes to your body. You can still achieve incredible results in your training, you just need to be a lot smarter in how you go about it. This article we show you how.

What often separates good athletes from great athletes in field and court sports is the ability to change direction explosively fast. At the highest level, the skills are pretty close to as good as it gets, the only way to go from being good to great is to find that "one thing" that no body else has. And in sports if you can change direction in a split second and seem to maintain or even increase speed, it gives you a huge advantage over your opponent. In tennis it gives you extra time to get to the next shot and control the point, in basketball it allows you to evade your defender and get open for a layup or jump shot. But how do some people learn this better than others? Is it just natural ability? Or is it a skill that can be learned? Well, just like skills of hitting a forehand in tennis or shooting a three point shot in basketball the art of change of direction is a skill that can be learned. And just like learning the skills of the game, the earlier you do this the better for it becomes a permanent patter of movement. Unfortunately this is not something that is taught well, if at all, which is a real shame to those who do not have a natural ability to move like this. Even worse is the potential danger that awaits from not learning the perfect technique of cutting and change of direction. This article we are going to explain why ALL kids must be taught the ability to change direction if they play sports and exactly how to do it.