A Life Spent Reading

I ordered this exercise DVD last week, and generally speaking, I like it quite a bit.

The DVD is divided into several sections, such as Thoracic Spine Mobility, Scapular Closed Chain and Active Wrist Mobilization. These sections each contain several exercises that you can use to warm up that particular part of the body. The idea of the DVD is to choose one exercise from each section, thus giving yourself a full and well-rounded upper body warm-up — and tune up — before exercise.

As someone who’s passed his 40th birthday and has a lot of weightlifting miles on his body, I found this DVD very useful. The exercises are well-chosen, they are well-explained and demonstrated, and the overall format of the DVD is easy to understand. Furthermore, they’re effective. After my first workout incorporating some of the Inside-Out exercises, I did indeed have a very good and pain-free upper body workout — not a given for me anymore.

I ordered the DVD alone, and for me that was fine. There is also a manual that you can buy, and if you don’t have a fairly decent background in anatomy, and want to understand what the two authors are saying in their “Rationale” clips, it would probably be beneficial to get that as well. As Mike Robertson says, “we put a lot more of the “how’s” and “why’s” in the manual, along with a glossary to help people better understand the geek-speak.” If you don’t care about the theory behind it all, then the DVD by itself is fine, as you will be able to see and understand how to perform the exercises using it alone.

If you are active in fitness and still doing the same old stretching to warm up before getting into your main activiity, you owe it to yourself to try something more effective. (Stretching is fine, but save it for the warm-down.) The benefits of dynamic warm-ups have been known to good coaches for at least two decades now, but the general athletic population still has yet to catch on. Inside-Out helps to get the word out.