Alright you guys, today we're going to talk about the R.A.M.P. protocol from chapter 14 of the NSCA textbook. So the R.A.M.P. protocol stands for Raise, Activate, and Mobilize. Those are kind of together and then Potention.
It's a warm-up protocol that the NSCA put together to ensure that athletes arrive at their training session ready for training and ready to get the most out of training. So first, the R in the R.A.M.P. protocol, raise. What we're trying to do here is raise the heart rate, raise your blood pressure, raise the sweat rate, raise your breathing rate, and raise your body temperature. So we're doing this through about five minutes of general activity.
It could be jumping rope. It could be running in place. It could be jogging the lap.
It could be getting on the exercise bike or the air bike, anything that generally raises those qualities. And you could do it more specifically too. So if you're a soccer athlete or you have a soccer athlete, you could be, you know, jogging on the pitch or doing some easy ball footwork or something to raise the heart rate.
If you're a swimmer, obviously you could do this in the pool. If you're about to do some sort of weightlifting movement, you could Do some dynamic stretching, dynamic mobility before your session for that raise part of the ramp protocol. The next part, activate and mobilize, what we're trying to do is activate specific muscle groups that will be used in the activity during practice and mobilize joints that we need to get full range of motion through. So we're doing targeted activations and mobilizations.
These are these are typically dynamic so we're not doing a lot of static stretching, maybe we're doing dynamic stretching. or dynamic stretching and mobilization sequences. We're doing targeted activations like glute activations, maybe some upper back, posterior chain activations to really target the musculature that may be not quite as activated due to a seated posture during the day or arriving at the session in the morning when you're not fully awake yet.
And then finally, the last stage, potentiate. Potentiation means to raise the effectiveness of the subsequent activity. So, and to potentiate part of the warm-up, what we're doing are very specific, specific to the training session, movements that start to increase in the velocity or the movement pattern specificity to the task at hand. So, if we're about to go squat, maybe we're doing some jump squats. If we're about to go sprint, well, maybe we're doing some sort of light plyometric activity or maybe some strides.
To be very specific to the task. But we're still sort of ramping up to that full training intensity. So the warm-up should take no more than about 15 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes. It should go through the raise, activate and mobilize, and the potentiate portions or sequences. And it should leave athletes optimally prepared to get the most adaptation that they can out of their training session.
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