The Fundamentals Series - Warming Up

How to Warm Up and Why it's Important for Muscle Growth and Strength

I see it all the time…people skipping their warm-up sets. They'll grab a bar, slap on their working weight, and start up their working sets right out of the gate. It's brutal on their bodies and actually hurts their working set performance too.

Warming up, in my opinion, is mandatory. I've always done it and continue to do it in varying degrees for every exercise of every training day. I firmly believe this is a key reason why I remain healthy and mobile after 25 years of hard weight training. I take the extra few minutes and the extra few sets to do things right...and it pays off. Oh boy does it pay off!

The purpose of the warm-up is to prime the body for your working sets. It is not to pre-exhaust the targeted muscles. I repeat, the purpose of the warm-up is to prime, not exhaust.

The first rule of warming up is to start very very light. As an example, for a squat, deadlift, bench press, or any barbell exercise, start with the barbell.....ya, just the barbell. Grab an empty barbell and complete a set of 10 reps to alert your mind and body as to which exercise you're about to perform.

There is a reason why the second set of an exercise is usually easier to execute. The first set makes the body aware of the exercise being done. It primes the body. Once the body knows what to expect for the second set, you're better off and the set will feel smoother and stronger than the first.

Once the body is made aware of the exercise at hand, it is time to start adding more weight to the exercise. Adding weight doesn't need to be complicated and I believe that using a set of rough guidelines is a surefire way to keep it simple.

I like to add 20% of the target working weight with each new warm-up set. Let's use a target working weight of 300lbs on the Barbell Squat for this example. This will give us a weight increase of 60lbs per warm-up set. 60lbs is 20% of 300lbs.

You might be thinking, 'that is a ton of warm-up sets,' especially if you're someone who hasn't done warm-ups at all in the past. Well, do you want to reduce your risk of injury and feel stronger during your working sets? An injury can take you out of the game for weeks or months, sometimes even years.

In reality, the entire warm-up scheme above should take 5-10 minutes, max. Each set should take a piddly 10-30 seconds due to the lower rep counts. Remember, you are simply priming the body with your warm-up sets. High reps are not needed! It doesn't take many reps for the body to realize that it needs to gear up and be ready.

The handful of minutes it takes to run through a few low-rep warm-up sets is well worth it when you consider the major effects of injury.

I'm going to lay out another example for a Barbell Bench Press with a target working weight of 225lbs. This will give us a weight increase of 45lbs per warm-up set, based on the 20% rule. 20% of 225lbs is 45lbs.

The total volume is kept low due to the concept of lowering reps as warm-up weight increases and your body is well-primed for your working sets as a result.

This is the key to a proper warm-up; prime the body with as little muscle fatigue as possible.

Here is another example for a Barbell Overhead Press with a target working weight of 135lbs. This will give us a 20% weight increase of roughly 25lbs per warm-up set.

Now that you've seen a few real-world examples of how I prefer to warm up, I want you to burn these three crucial points into your brain and keep them at the forefront of your thoughts during your next training session.

1. The purpose of the warm-up is to prime the body for your working sets. It is not to pre-exhaust the muscles to be used.

2. Keep total warm-up volume to a minimum by lowering set rep counts as warm-up weights increase. As a result, your body is energized for your working sets.

3. Never skip your warm-up sets. They improve form and strength, reduce injury rate, and increase training longevity.

In closing, I’ve used this warm-up method thousands of times with clients and it’s never failed to do it’s job. I've seen strength and form improve in many clients after I adjusted their warm-up ritual. Some of these clients warmed up too much, some warmed up too little.

Regardless, their strength and form improved once their warm-up improved. It happened like clockwork.