You’re an armchair athlete who wants to get out of your La-Z-Boy and get into shape. Or you’re an elite competitor training to best the competition. Or, more likely, you’re somewhere in between.

Either way, a good warm-up that stretches out muscles, loosens joints and prepares your body for the workout or game that follows is key to getting good results.

Thomas Heffernan, strength coordinator for University of Hawaii-Manoa athletics for 11 years, including the Warriors football team, has some tips to help weekend warriors get ready for battle. In a capsule his advice is this: get warm and get moving.

"We just try to increase the body temperature," Heffernan said one recent morning after football practice as graduate assistant Grant Steen demonstrated the team’s warm-up and stretching routine. "It’s a good sign that you’re ready to get started when you break a sweat."

The football team accomplishes this through a combination of light running drills and what is known as "dynamic" and "static" stretching.

Dynamic stretching involves stretching over a range of motion, while static stretching involves holding a stressed position for a period of time, usually 10 to 20 seconds, as in old-fashioned toe-touching. In the last few years, dynamic stretching has taken precedence as the preferred warm-up method, while static stretching is recommended after a workout, Heffernan said.

"(Doing) a lot of static stretching, that was the norm a few years ago," he said. "Now we find it more beneficial to do more active stretching and getting them to sweat. Static stretching is better afterward, during the cool-down. You can get into a position and stretch out. But definitely, the active, dynamic stretching is better before the activity."

FOR THEIR WARM-UP and stretching routine, football players use the entire field, with the 160-foot-wide gridiron marked off by hash marks, as a convenient yardstick. Players will go from sideline to hash mark doing the "RDL walk," a walking version of the Romanian dead lift which involves standing on one foot, bending over to touch the turf, returning to the standing position and then moving to the next foot. A second stretch is knee hugs — rising on one foot to pull the other knee high to the chest, striding to the next hash mark, then doing quadriceps pulls from there to the sideline.

The players then turn around and cross the field again using other dynamic stretching drills, such as high kicks, lunges and a twisting maneuver, or the "sumo walk" — a series of squats known in more scatological terms as "bear in the woods" at some schools, Steen said.

"The stretching we do, anybody could do and benefit from them in some capacity," said Steen, a former University of Iowa linebacker who is in his second year in UH’s sports administration program. "If you look up fitness and surfing, it’s all fitness and flexibility — core, lower-back strength. … You have to be flexible throughout your trunk."

Targeting the right muscle groups is important for a proper warm-up routine, Heffernan said. Football is a leg-intensive sport, with wide receivers, running backs and defensive backs requiring a sprinter’s speed, and interior linemen needing a powerful base for leverage. Most of the football team’s warm-up focuses on the legs, hips and groin, Heffernan said.

Quarterbacks, however, especially in a pass-happy offense like the Warriors’, need strong, flexible arms and shoulders, so Heffernan has quarterbacks do simple arm swings to loosen up the shoulder, something a volleyball or baseball player or even a surfer might find beneficial. Heffernan combines them with leg stretches to create a fully dynamic routine.

"We do some skips and arm swings, some slides and arm swings," he said. "For those guys we get a PVC pipe and we do shoulder stretching, or we got tubes and bands. That’s a great way to warm up the rotator cuff."

ANOTHER SIMPLE apparatus players use is a hard foam noodle, about 6 inches in diameter. Players lie on it, with the noodle across their lower backs, and roll back and forth, kneading and working the lower back and core muscles. Leg muscles also can be worked in this way.

How far a muscle or joint should be stretched is up to the individual. Heffernan said to stretch until you feel "a little discomfort."

Football players are young and limber, but Heffernan, who at 41 looks like he could still manhandle a linebacker as he did during his playing days as a blocking slotback, follows the adage to "listen to your body" when working out on his own.

It is also important to establish a routine that is enjoyable as well.

"If the players like it, then we try to stick with it," Heffernan said.