Peer Led Warm-up

What is the purpose of warming up?

Warming up before you perform or rehearse is important so that your mind and body is fully prepared. For example, you must be focused and warming up tells your mind that you must pay attention. You may also be more confident because you know that you have readied yourself for the real thing. Your body must also be prepared for performing. This means making sure that your muscles won’t be stretched too suddenly when dancing or acting causing mild to severe injuries.

For example, stretching is vital before any form of exercise and that includes most performances. Stretching means to deliberately flex or stretch a muscle to improve its elasticity. Stretching not only makes us more comfortable when moving about but it also helps to prevent injuries by relaxing them and preparing them for movement. Since our entire body is made of muscles, every part of us should be stretched from head to toe. The most important parts of us that we should stretch are the body parts that we use the most. This includes our legs, arms, torsos and necks.

During dance, however, we use our body parts more than we would in everyday life. Therefore, stretches must be more thorough unlike the brief reach we may do with our arms when we first wake up. Yoga positions such as ‘downward dog’ or some exercises such as press-ups prepare our muscles for lots of movement.

The muscles in our throat must be warmed-up too both for singing and acting. We can do this by certain vocal exercises like tongue-twisters and singing notes with different vowels. Without warming up our vocals before singing, we can cause vocal nodules or an unpleasant, strained sound.

Boosting moral before a performance also counts as warming up. This could mean having a group game or a teamwork exercise. Or even a team chant. This warms up your mind and boosts your confidence so that you can do your best when performing.

Design a Warm-up

To begin with, play a game together that gets your mind thinking. The game I would choose is a word-association game where you go around in a circle saying a word related to a topic that has not been said before and you must not stutter. I feel like this game is great for warming up the mind and boosting people’s moral. This would take ten minutes.

Then, I wold do some stretches. I like to begin simply by slow head movements from side to side and then some balances. Then I would have people stretch their legs and arms and finally torso muscles. The harder exercises such as planking (which stretch and work the core muscles) would be at the end so that the body was more prepared. This would take ten minutes.

After this, I would do a vocal warm-up. I would have everyone stretch their mouth and tongue and then go onto some singing exercises like humming and making noises at different notes. This would take another ten minutes.

For health and safety reasons, the area we are in must be spacious with nothing heavy out or any items on the floor.

To ensure the safety of everyone, I would ask that everyone go bear-foot since the floor could be slippery. I would also make sure that everyone was spread out to avoid collisions and ask that everyone’s belongings were pushed far to the sides.