Warming Up

How do most people warm up? They might jump on the bike or the treadmill for five or ten minutes for a general warm up, then they might do a few light static stretches and then they’ll move onto some light weight, high rep work before moving onto their first exercise. Then they settle in and they start warming up for their work sets. The problem here is how these warm up sets are conducted.

What’s the purpose of a warm up? Specifically, a warm up serves as a neuromuscular rehearsal of the upcoming lift as well as an opportunity to get your body used to progressively heavier loads.

So how do most people warm up? Let’s use the bench press for example. Most lie down and with just the bar, will rep out 20 reps and then they’ll throw on a bit of weight and do another 15 reps. Then they’ll throw on a little more and do 12 reps, or something similar. This kind of warm up is not only not your best option, it’s actually counterproductive to maximal strength.

The more motor units recruited the more force production is possible. So the goal is to recruit and activate as many fast twitch motor units as possible. And the problem with our high rep warm up? The high reps one, contribute to the build up of residual fatigue and also produce lactic acid. The production of lactic acid is associated with a drop in the pH of your blood and therefore an increase in blood acidity. This is associated with the unfortunate consequence of impaired motor unit recruitment. Lactic acid impairs the nervous system’s ability to recruit and activate the high threshold – those with the greatest size and strength potential – motor units. So, to avoid this we need to focus on low rep warm up sets. A warm up for a 250-pound bench press might look like this:

• 95×5

• 135×5

• 185×3

• 225×1

This serves both warm-up purposes – neuromuscular rehearsal of the exercise as well as getting your body used to progressively heavier weights – as well as avoids the pitfalls of higher-rep warm up sets.

Now this all assumes that a proper dynamic warm up was conducted prior to starting as well. Mandatory? No. Highly beneficial? I believe so, particularly if you’re suffering from some nagging ailments and long-term training health.

There’s another little trick that you can incorporate into your warm up that’ll result in an immediate increase in your strength. Recall that the more motor units you can activate the stronger you’re going to be and the heavier the weighs you’re lifting the more motor units you’re going to activate. This little trick involves doing a heavy single prior to starting your work sets. The key however, is that this single rep is heavier than your work sets. So, taking our last warm up example and assuming you were going to be performing six to eight reps on the bench press with 250, your last warm up set wouldn’t be the 225 that the previous example used, but rather in the neighborhood of 275 pounds. What this heavy single does is potentiate the nervous system resulting in greater motor unit activation. So when you drop back down to start your working sets, you’re going to have more motor units activated and ready to go than if you didn’t perform that heavy single rep as your last warm up set. The result will be an immediate increase in strength on your work sets.

Give it a shot … and start warming up properly if you’re not already.