How to warm-up
The purpose of the warm-up phase is to increase your efficiency and prevent injury during your training sessions. You wouldn’t start your car and immediately speed away, would you? You’d start your car, let it run and warm up, then drive away. We should treat our bodies in the same way.
There are two parts to the warm-up: The general warm-up and warm-up sets.
General warm-up
The general warm-up focuses on increasing your core body temperature and mobilizing your joints for the activities ahead. Warming up takes approximately 10-15 minutes and should be done before each training session. Follow the below plan to perform the general warm-up:
Warm-up sets
A warm-up set is a lighter and less intense set performed prior to the first set of a given exercise. It prepares the body for the heavier lifting to come.
While you can perform warm-up sets during any program phase, they are more important in Phases 3 and above because of the increased workload.
Some benefits of doing warm-up sets:
Helps prevent injury
Activates the muscles you’ll need for your set
Increases blood flow to the target muscles
Increases blood flow to the target
Steps to perform warm-up sets
Determine what weight you’re going to lift in your first set (working set): Your working set’s weight should be challenging enough to help you make progress, but not so heavy that you sacrifice form or risk injury.
Determine the number of warm-up sets: Depending on the exercise, you may need to perform one or more warm-up sets.
For Barbell exercises like Squats, Bench Press or Deadlifts, you may need to perform multiple warm-up sets to properly prepare your body for the heavier work. The higher the working set’s weight, more warm-up sets are required. For smaller, isolated exercises like Triceps Pushdown, one or two warm-up sets may be sufficient.
Choose your warm-up weight: As good practice for Barbell exercises, always start your first warm-up set with just the empty bar. Then, as a rule of thumb, your next warm-up set should be around
50-65% of your first set. Your last warm-up set should be around 80-90% of your working set. For non-barbell exercises, the same applies except replacing the empty bar warm-up with a 50-65% effort set.
Rep range: Reps should reduce as the number of warm-up sets and weight increase. As a general rule, the first set should be around 8-10 reps. For the last warm-up set (80-90%), around 3 reps should be sufficient.
Example 1
You're in Phase 4 and are about to perform a Barbell Bench Press with a target weight of 30kg for the working set. The warm-up sets will look like this:
In this example, the working weight is 30kg and an empty bar usually weighs around 15-20kg. As a result, the first warm-up set is already at 50-65% making the next warm-up set higher at 75%.
Example 2
This is a max effort set. You're in the last week and about to perform a max effort Deadlift of 8 reps. Your target weight is 80kg. The warm-up sets will look like this:
