Warming Up
Summary:
Warming up is essential to reduce the risk of injury and ensure maximum muscle engagement. Your warm up should include:
1: Increasing body temperature (eg: 5-10 minutes light cardio / walking – OR wearing a hoodie on the way to the gym / turning your car heater on if you’re short on time!)
2. Engaging target muscles / taking them through their full range of motion (banded warm ups and activation drills)
3. Warm up sets; the same movements you will be doing but with lighter weights, mostly applicable for your compounds (squats, bench, deadlifts etc) rather than isolations (bicep curls etc).
Note: Make sure you are performing warm up sets as if it was your working weight.
Warm-Up Sets
We would recommend performing at least 2 warm up sets for each exercise. The more technical the movement or heavier the weight, the more warm up sets you will likely have to do.
Avoiding Fatigue
We want to make sure we are warming up enough but not to the point of fatigue. To mitigate this, we can reduce the amount of reps we do as we get closer to the working weight.
Here is an example, where 100kg for 6 reps is the working weight:
Notice how the closer you get to the working weight, the lower the reps and lower the jumps in weight. This is to make sure you are comfortable with the weight but not so much that it will affect your performance for the working sets. There is no right or wrong way nor a specific formula for warming up. You may find you need more warm up sets on certain movements than others to get in the “groove”. Either way, make sure you are suitable warm and able to activate the required muscle for the movements before each exercise.
