Getting a good warm up before you attempt any heavy lifting is an absolute necessity. The purpose of a warm up should be pretty obvious from its name. You need to get your body warm and the blood pumping before you start lifting heavy.
Another fact that should be pretty obvious is that your ability to get your body warm will depend on the temperature the place you’re exercising in. If it’s winter time, a cool evening, or if you life in a cold place, then your body will probably require more warm up than it would on a hot summer afternoon.
Why warm up:
Why you need to warm up is a matter of safety. Just to help you visualize what’s going on, I’d like you to think about a rubber band. This will represent your muscles and other tissues. What happens if you stretch a rubber band that has been sitting in the freezer?
The rubber band probably snaps before you are able to stretch it very far. A warm rubber band, on the other hand, can probably be stretched a long ways before it breaks. This is what rubber bands were designed to do, after all. They are designed to stretch, but they can’t do that job very well cold.
The same is true for your muscles. They can’t do their job nearly as well when they are cold, and starting out with a heavy weight before your muscles are nice and warm can lead to injury and muscle tears. Trust me, you don’t want to be like that rubber band that snaps when it’s cold.
Warm ups are even more important for the bigger exercises such as the squat, deadlift, and the bench press. These will require a more extensive warm up, while other exercises will likely only need a a set or two with a light weight to get warmed up.
How to warm up
1. Clothing: Let’s start off with the right clothing. Wearing a sweater or workout pants is a good idea in cold weather until you’re able to raise you body temperature. Consider wearing several small layers instead of one heavy layer. Smaller layers can be peeled off one at a time until your body temperature is high enough.
2. Do static stretches at the end: In case you don’t know what this means, static stretches are those done without movement. The traditional stretches that you are familiar with are probably mostly all static stretches, such as touching your toes.
Static stretches have not been shown to do anything to help prevent injuries when you lift. In fact, many believe that static stretches increase the number of injuries you have when you lift weights. This may be because weight lifting requires you to keep your muscles tight, and loose muscles holding heavy weights can sometimes move beyond their normal range of motion.
Again, think of the rubber band analogy. The best time to stretch your muscles is when they are already nice and warm after you are finished lifting weights. Take a few minutes at the end of your workout to do your static stretches and lengthen your tightened muscles back out.
3. General warm up: Do some running for five minutes just to warm up your body temperature. You can really pick which type of activity you’d like to do to get your temperature up. Five minutes on the treadmill works fine, so does 5 minutes on an exercise bike. Doing a set or two of fairly light weight squats will also warm up your body very quickly.
4. Dynamic warm ups: The word static means staying still, and dynamic basically means with movement, or motion. Do dynamic warmups and stretches before your workout instead of static stretches. You can check out a decent list of dynamic warm ups here. You don’t have to do all of these, but a few leg kicks, butt kicks, and maybe some high knees should be done before squats/deadlifts at the very least.
If you don’t want to look silly by marching around the gym doing your leg kicks, go ahead and hold onto something and just do one leg at a time as you swing your leg in front of you for 10-15 reps or more. If you’re ever in doubt about your warm ups, make the mistake of doing too much warm up instead of too little.
5. Exercise-specific warm ups: You will need to do 1-2 sets or more of warm ups specific to the muscle group you are about to start working. For example, if you’re going to do the bench press, you might start off with a light warm up set (or more) of 12 reps. Choose a weight that is light enough that you can easily get 12 reps.
Pyramid sets: The idea behind pyramid sets is that you start with a lighter weight doing more reps. Maybe you start with 12 reps on the first set. The second set uses a heavier weight for 10 reps, the next 8 reps, and then 6.
Pyramid rep schemes work best for compound movements like the bench press. They don’t work quite as well for single-joint movements like bicep curls. The point here is that pyramid sets help you to ease into a heavy weight more safely.
That doesn’t mean you have to use them all the time for every single workout you ever do, as sets across (the same number of reps on each set) are useful as well, but pyramid reps are good to keep in mind.
Stretching between sets: There is some disagreement out there as to whether this is helpful or not. If you feel like your muscle is getting a little bit too tight after a heavy set and you’d like to loosen it out a little bit, I see nothing wrong with doing a light stretch for a moment between sets. Others may disagree with me on that, but just don’t go crazy with a deep stretch between sets, and you should be just fine.
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April 21st, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I usually always start off my workouts with squats since I do full body each workout in my routine. So when I warm up I always start off with the bar and just add weight from there til I get to my work sets. I find this works well for me. By the time I get to my set weight I’m sufficiently warmed up.
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:11 am
Sean- Best to start any workout where legs are involved with the squat first. I’ve found that my body temp is feeling very warm after a warmup set with even just 85 on my back for warmup (still wearing a sweater). Starting with an empty bar and adding weight is a great way to ease into worksets without injury.
April 30th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Hmmm, I attune this to the “listen to your own body” philosophy. Mine likes me to deep-stretch the hell out of it throughout an entire workout. I do both static and dynamic stretching before, during, and after everything from cardio to compound lifting. I have especially come to like performing a copious amount of arm swings while working my chest.
Never been a fan of pyramind sets. I try to keep it across, but sometimes do the opposite of pyramid sets and actually lessen the weight with each set, in order to still be able to do the same amount of reps each set (though it should be noted I usually only do 2 sets of any one specific lift). Is there any downside/negative effect to doing the opposite of pyramid sets that you know of?
May 1st, 2008 at 2:52 am
Witmonger- Probably the biggest downside to stripping the weight with each set is the possibility of overtraining. On sets across, you might do let’s say 3+ sets at a certain weight and fail on the last set or so. That means the first couple sets weren’t to failure. You’re describing a weight heavy enough that you can only get up for the first set, which trains the muscle to near failure early on. To do a second set, you must lower the weight and your muscles are trained to failure or near failure again. As you can see, this can be more stressful and takes the muscles past exhaustion.
You said you do it “sometimes”, which is good (and 2 sets at a time). It can be useful here and there to give your muscles a shock, but too much intensity on a regular basis can also lead to overtraining. But it’s a very individual thing as you know. Great question btw.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Ah, thanks for both the clear ups (this + the Know Thy Pecs article). Sets across it is for me, then!