 Laura Kennington here. I've teamed up with Ellis Brigham to bring you some free workouts designed to improve your strength and conditioning for the trails. So this session today is all about laying down some good foundations. I'm going to go through some warm-up exercises to do before you head out for your run. Warm muscles just perform much more efficiently. It's good to get the oxygen flowing to all of them before you head out and as part of that we're going to be doing some glute activation work. So glutes are the biggest muscle group we have in the body and it's really important to recruit them for running. If you spend a lot of time sat down you'll find that your glutes actually switch off and if you head out for a run before waking them up a bit the smaller muscle groups get involved to try and compensate and that's how a lot of running injuries occur. So for example if you've ever had really grumpy calf muscles this video is especially important for you. The second bit of this is to do after your run. So I'm going to go through some maintenance stretching, some body maintenance just to keep everything nice and supple and nice and functional. Okay so now you've been out for your run and you're back home and this is a nice five to ten minute stretch routine that you can do afterwards. So by now your muscles should be nice and warm which means that we get a much deeper stretch. Regularly stretching to maintain or even improve your flexibility and range of movement is really important again for preventing injuries especially for those of you that spend a lot of time sat at your desk you'll find that your hip flexors can get really tight. This is especially important for cyclists as well. So doing this a few times a week just keeps everything nice and happy.