Warm Up

Why?

A lot of runners (and I can't claim I'm not one of them) have a tendency to decide to go for a run, shoes on, out the door and away they go. This isn't necessarily a problem in all cases; sometimes the run is the warm up (as an example, I wouldn't expect anyone off on their way out for a 2 hour run at low intensity to first do 15 minutes of increasingly vigorous lunges).
However, when the effort is shorter and more intense (and this inverse relationship between time and intensity is something I will discuss in the future) it's generally worth doing a solid warm up first. The purpose of this is to raise the body temperature, get some synovial fluid flowing, increase blood flow, work those joints and muscles through the active range and prime the body for more vigorous activity.

The approach we're going to use is known as RAMP.

How?

We're going to spend a bit of time working through RAMP (Raise Activate Mobilise Potentiate). Ideally we need to match the length of the workout to the intensity of the session, but for now we'll start with somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes

Raise

Firstly we need to get the blood pumping and warm everything up, starting out nice and easy. This might look like some light jogging or skipping, maybe after a bit of vigorous walking to start.

There's no fixed numbers for this but I'd recommend between 1/3 to 1/2 of the warm up in this section.

Activate and Mobilise

We'll often find these next two stages tend to get worked in tandem. The goal here is to activate the muscles we're going to be using and mobilise the relevant joints through the active range of motion for the session. We're going to dedicate around 1/4 to 1/3 of the warm up to this

We're going to be doing our lunges, squats, broad jumps, etc in this phasse. We're looking to fully engage the muscles and joints through the full range of motion. A particularly useful lunge variant is walking lunges with a spinal twist at the bottom position, as this not only works the hips, knees and ankles through the range, but also mobilises the spine, which is an important but often overlooked contributor to running.

I've included a very poorly drawn image of this below

Potentiate

This is going to be the remaining 1/4 to 1/3 of the workout. Here's we really ramp (see what I did there) up the intensity. We're also looking to start to move towards the movement patterns for the session.

Think several reps of strides (short controlled accelerations up to 85-90% effort), sprints (fast efforts at close to 100%) and power skips (ballistic and powerful push offs for distance). Each rep is likely to be between 15 and 30 secs, with a break betwee (maybe 1:2 ratio on active:rest).