Pumping out 20 reps of your first exercise is probably as far as your warm up goes, and then you begin to wonder why your tendons, ligaments, and joints become inflamed.
As you get older, the importance of the warm up begins to show. Most of my clients are in their late 30s or early 40s and for them, a warm up consisted of a 5 min jog or walk on the treadmill.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t get you prepped and ready for your lifts.
When we train, we do a lot of heavy barbell or dumbbell work, and the main lift is somewhere near the beginning of the workout. Now, if we just jumped straight into a 120kg deadlift, it would be a little stupid right?
Especially when they’ve been sitting at a desk all day and the only bit of exercise they’ve had is walking to the studio.
Warm ups provide an effective way of raising the heart rate and increasing blood flow. Which is probably what you already know. But we need to do more than that. A good warm up primes the movement, and allows you to stimulate your nervous system and in turn our bodies (brain and motor programs) will become more familiar with repeated movements, allowing us to improve our performance over time.
A warm up is stimulating enough to ramp you up, but not wear you down with too much volume at an ineffective weight.
Perhaps you are warming up, and you’re doing sets of 8 reps leading up to your working weight, it’s still too much volume which will usually take away some of the strength you have for the main lift.
For instance, here’s a common warm up I see:
Set 1: 30kg x 8
Set 2: 40kg x 8
Set 3: 50kg x 8
Set 4: 60kg x 8
Working Set: 70kg x 8 (for 3 sets)
The thing is, you’ve just done 32 reps at lighter loads that will hinder the main working sets you have. We call this junk volume. With this in mind, here’s a better solution:
From the image above, you can see we’ve drastically reduced the reps and strategically increased the weight with each set. We’ve gone from 32 reps to 15, cutting the volume in half whilst still allowing you to practice the movement.
This will be far more effective, and allow you to stay fresh enough that the warm up sets won’t impact your main working sets.
Let’s take squats with the example above, knowing your working sets will be 100kg for 5 reps.
Warm up set #1: 40kg x 5
Warm up set #2: 55kg x 5
Warm up set #3: 70kg x 3
Warm up set #4: 85kg x 2
MAIN LIFT
We’ll do this for the main lift — but this doesn’t take away from the fact that we still follow a ramp up warm up that consists of foam rolling, mobility movements, the assault bike or ski, and some stability work. And this usually depends on the first lift.
For instance, if we’re doing squats or deadlifts, we’ll go through hip thrusts and some hamstring curls, and if we’re doing any push or pull movements face pulls will be the primer.
Here’s an example I created below: