Ideal warm ups and workouts designed for GAMERS is absolutely necessary to improve performance, and increase career longevity.

This biggest problem with all of the warm ups for GAMERS I’ve seen online is none of the warm ups or workouts address the REAL issue for improving physical performance, and preventing injury.

That’s why I designed the Gamer Workout Program.

Every gamer would ideally need a customized loadout for their warm up routine, but I wanted to provide an example that I think would help a lot of people out.

This warm up targets:

• Fingers and hands
• Elbows
• Shoulders and neck
• Back
• Eye Positions

Here is a break down of each of the exercises:

1. High Sitting Back Expansion Breathing

• Goal: Learn to “reach with your ribs” during a longer than usual exhale
• Set up: Sit with your hips higher than your knees/ elbows resting on surface/ hands in line or just outside of the elbow
• Feels like: Shoulders are tired/ pull down between the shoulder blades/ back lower ribs and space between shoulder blades expand on the inhale.

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2. Rockback Lazy Bear Breathing

• Goal: Make the exhale and “reach with your ribs and elbows” a little more difficult
• Set Up: Make sure elbows are like train tracks with your knees/ DO NOT let the elbows roll out
• Feels like: Shoulders are a little tired just getting into position/ The exhale and reach gets the shoulders working and feeling a pull between the shoulder blades
• What does this do?: This is actually the 1st step to getting rid of forward shoulders, NOT pulling them back (I know the internet and authorities have told you otherwise)

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3. Hands and Knees (aka Quadruped) Breathing

• Goal: Get the shoulders in the fastest position to game in (creates the most space for blood flow and decompress the nerves coming down from your neck into your hands)
• Set Up: Knees under hips/ Hands under shoulders/ Feel the palm of your hand on the pinky side, and the 1st knuckle of your pointer finger.
• Feels like: Less pull between shoulder blades, but should feel expansion on the INHALE in the chest, and stretch in the hands
• P.S. These actually create long term changes to the flexibility in your hands and wrists rather than just pulling on them.

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4. Low Oblique Sit with Push Away

• Goal: Get the elbows, ribs, and eyes ready to assume the gaming position for a long time. Helps the shape of the body and eyes to move faster with LESS EFFORT.
• Set Up: Whatever side you are on, try to get the palm on the pinky side of your hand down, the inside of your elbow, your hip and the outside of the knee. Have a dot on the wall about 20 feet away from you to look up at.
• Feels like: Shoulder and forearm get tired/ When sagging into the floor ribs on bottom side expand on inhale, and opposite side when pushing away.

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5. Egg Rolls

• Goal: Gets the back and shoulders loosened up, plus helps to quickly locate targets with the eyes.
• Set Up: Sit on the ground with your knees bent and holding your shins
• Feels like: Your rocking on the ground.
• P.S. Make sure the dot is still in the distance. Every time you come back up to sitting try and locate the the dot to bring it into focus before you go back down again.

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6. Heels Elevated Assisted Squat Holds

• Goal: Get the body used to the stress of the sitting position without compensating and settling into a slower and more compressed posture while gaming.
• Set Up: Make sure your entire foot is on a ramp surface/ Hands using a sturdy kitchen sink to lean back on the heels
• Feels like: Start on your heels, as your shin go forward don’t let the heels lift at all, but the weight will be evenly distributed between the ball of your feet and the inside of your heels.

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7. Hear Hold Breathing

• Goal: Get the shoulders, neck, elbows, hands ready to endure the high stress of Esports.
• Set Up: Same starting position as the quadruped breathing, now just lifting the knees off the ground.
• All the feels from quadruped breathing, just more intense in the abs (but NO CRUNCHING)

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The examples above for meant to be for educational purposes only. It is in no way meant to be medical or professional advice.

The truth about nearly every piece of Gamer warm up content on the internet coming out of the United States at this time are only considering the location of pain as the SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM.

The Gamer Workout Program and Gaming Workout 1 on 1 Rehab are applying principles from the highest level traditional sports training and bringing it to Gamers.

I know teams are winning world championships with less than ideal training and rehab, but I want to see players have career lengths similar to European soccer players resulting in gaming dynasty’s.

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If your someone who is struggling to feel better despite having already tried going to the Doctor, PTs, Chiro’s, then consider giving me a call or email because more than likely you haven’t done anything similar to what I will put you through.

My Email: cameron@ptherapyinstitute.com

The 3 most common mistakes that I see other PT’s, Doctor’s, and Trainers make when trying to help people with neck pain is:

• Try to make the muscles around the neck bigger.
• Try to stretch the muscles around the neck.

• Try to have patients actively tuck their chin and pull their head back (if someone has a forward head position)

*PLEASE DO NOT do the activity linked directly below*

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As someone who has spent a lot of money and time learning to be a Physical Therapist better help people get bigger neck muscles, how to target certain muscles for stretching, and having A LOT of patients tuck their chin and pull their head back, I found out pretty quickly it wasn’t helpful to do any of those activities.

As someone who completed 3 additional years of formal training after getting my Doctoral degree in Physical Therapy, has multiple mentors and tries to learn something new every day to better help my patients and clients I can confidently say that stretching and strengthening alone are not successful principles for helping people alleviate their neck pain.

If you are someone who has been struggling with neck pain and headaches chances are you have been told by other healthcare professionals that you have one, or all 3 of the above mentioned issues.

So then you might be wondering if exercising to get a stronger/ more stable neck, and stretching doesn’t help with my neck pain, then what will?!

I have 2 general helpful hints:

• Learning to breathe into your lower back

• Learning how to comfortably unshrug (without feeling any tension in your neck or shoulders). See videos at bottom of post.

Lets talk about breathing real quick without getting lost in the weeds.

Every time you take a breath your rib cage needs to expand in multiple directions at one time, like a balloon being filled up. However in many civilizations we are so afraid of ending up in a position where we are bent forward looking like a “?” or a “C” that for generations everyone has been told to “stand up straight.”

Now stand up straight can mean different things for different people, but for most it means:

• Pull your shoulders back
• Pull your head back
• Make your back as tall as possible
• Keep your weight on your toes

The action of doing all 4 of these results in closing off the space for your rib cage and lungs to fill with air. The balloon won’t be able to expand.

However whenever going to the Doctor or most Physical Therapists/ Chiropractors they assume the rib cage is moving. More than likely they have never been exposed to the idea that the patient’s rib cage is NO LONGER moving like a balloon, or they just don’t see the importance in it.

They often don’t even check to assess how the patient is breathing.

But let me tell you, it is VERY IMPORTNANT.

Why?

Because if your rib cage doesn’t balloon out to take a breath in, then compress everywhere to exhale…

The only way you can continue to breathe is to use your NECK TO LIFT your rib cage up. And guess how many times your take a breath in and out everyday?

18,000 – 23,000 per day.

Let me give you some context… lets says I handed you a 1 lb weight and asked you to do 3 sets of 15 bicep curls. No big deal right?

Now what if I asked you to do 20,000 1 lb bicep curls by the end of the day? How do you think your arm would feel? Not great.

That is what your neck is doing EVERYDAY to keep you alive. Your neck isn’t “too weak,” it actually has not gotten a break in a very long time.

So you can imagine when I see health and wellness professionals give activities like the one’s below without any assessment of how the patient breathes, I get a little frustrated.

@hpforgamers

The sombrero has its benefits @Iron Neck #healthygaming #1hpneck

♬ Se Acabo (Remix) – The Beatnuts

@hpforgamers

Tag a friend who has terrible gaming posture #healthygaming

♬ Jiggle Jiggle – Duke & Jones & Louis Theroux

Plus it doesn’t make sense IF the main reason for neck pain was due to muscles not being strong enough AND too tight because they are essentially opposite things.

If you wanted to teach muscles how to relax and turn off, that is a skill in itself. Making a muscle work HARDER is not a good plan of action to help a muscle to learn to RELAX.

I know the theory in the PT and Training world is that the “muscles are tight because they are too weak to stabilize the joint so they are have to recruit all of the muscles to hold up their head.”

Or in some realms of chiropractic’s the reasoning behind muscles tightness is that the spine or ribs are “out of place,” but after they are put back into place you have to move around carefully to make sure they don’t fall out again…

Are both of these completely false? They are 2 very small concepts reduced to paint entire picture of why someone is suffering with neck pain. In respects there is some truth to them in other parts of the body, but it often has nothing to do with neck pain.

So what can you do to help yourself?

Try these out below:

Not in Maine to work with me in person?

That’s okay! I work with a lot of people online as well. Schedule a call to see how I can help you.

References

Kaltenborn, F., Evjenth, O., Kaltenborn, T. B., Morgan, M., and Vollowitz, E. The Spine: Volume II, 5th Edition: 2009.

Chaitow, L., Gilbert, C., Bradley, D. Recognizing and Treating Breathing Disorders: A Multidisciplinary Approach: 2014.

DeTroyer, A., Boriek, A. Mechanics of the respiratory muscles. American Physiological Society. Comprehensive Physiology. 1:1273-1300, 2011.