Warm-up With Chris Hinshaw

Chris Hinshaw is a professional triathlete, renowned endurance coach and instructor for the CrossFit Aerobic Capacity Course. At Tennessee Tech, Hinshaw leads a group of elite CrossFit Games competitors through a series of warm-up drills. The drills—24 in all—begin with prep work for the hips and lower body. The first five are called high-knee karaoke, over the hurdle, knee to chest, figure four and lunge. “So what we do … is we focus on the hips. We do a lot of emphasis there early on because that’s the area where CrossFit athletes are really the tightest,” Hinshaw explains to the group, which includes Games champs Rich Froning Jr. and Camille Leblanc-Bazinet. Drills six through 12 are called lunge with a torso twist, toe touch, high knees, butt kicks, straight leg, sidestep and sidestep jumping jack. Hinshaw then moves on to warming up the upper body with sitting arm swings and standing arm swings. The next drills work on the knees and ankles: toes-out walk, toes-in walk, walk on heels, walk on toes, walk on outside of foot, walk on inside of foot and 50-yard hashmarks. The final drills feature short runs of 20, 40 and 60 yards at about 80 percent of max effort. “The key to a good running warm-up is really not to overstretch your muscles. You want that tension. You want that spring-like effect,” Hinshaw says. Video by Heber Cannon. The CrossFit Journal -- () — CrossFit is the world’s leading platform for improving health and performance. In the 20 years since its founding, CrossFit has grown from a garage gym in Santa Cruz, California, into the world’s most effective program for improving health and performance through nutrition and exercise. CrossFit is the world’s leading provider of accredited performance-based training courses and certifications and has more than 125,000 credentialed coaches across the world. The program can be modified to welcome people of all ages and abilities and millions of people have already experienced CrossFit’s transformational benefits in more than 13,000 affiliated gyms across 158 countries. CrossFit also directs the CrossFit Games season, beginning with the annual CrossFit Open, through which athletes at every level compete worldwide, and culminating in the CrossFit Games, where top athletes compete for the title of Fittest on Earth®. Learn more about CrossFit → Find a CrossFit gym near you → Find CrossFit Courses near you → View CrossFit workouts → Subscribe to CrossFit email newsletters → Learn more about the CrossFit Games → CrossFit® - Forging Elite Fitness® The CrossFit Games® - The Sport of Fitness™ - The Fittest On Earth™