Ep. #322: The Best Way to Warm Up For Your Workouts

Hey, this is Mike Matthews from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. And I apologize for my absence from YouTube for the last four to six weeks or so. I have a good excuse. It’s because I have been basically working seven days a week, I don’t know, 10 plus hours a day. On creating new third editions of my flagship books for men and women bigger leaner stronger and thinner leaner stronger because I wanted to get them done as quickly as possible.

I want these new third editions out by December. And to do that, I had to basically push everything aside and work on just those projects obsessively, but it’s going well. I’m about. 70 percent of the way through, I have to record audiobooks or starting on Monday, I think it’s going to take me, I’m going to guess, two weeks to get the audiobooks done.

And then from there it’s just a sprint to get all the final publish ready files done. The digital files, the e books, the audiobook files, and the print files for the printer and so forth. Anyways, my point is, for the rest of this month, I’m going to be pretty tied up. Recording the audio books and finishing the last little bits and pieces.

But once all that’s done things will go back to normal and I’ll go back to my normal posting schedule of, I was doing three of these short videos, two or three of these short videos. I think it was actually two, two short videos a week and then three longer podcasts that’s going to resume once I’m through.

This BLS TLS 3. 0 project as I’m calling, but that’s not what this video is about. Of course, this video is about warming up. Let’s talk about warming up for workouts. Is it necessary? And if so, what is the right way to do it? What is the wrong way to do it? And so forth. Now, some people say that you absolutely have to warm up, that it’s vital.

Other people say that it’s completely unnecessary. Have you ever seen a lion warm up before it takes down the gazelle? Some people like to use that analogy. Who’s right? The long story short is as far as weightlifting goes, warming up properly is an important part of gaining muscle and strength, but not necessarily for the reasons that you might think.

For example, while animal research shows that warmer muscles and tendons can handle more force until they tear, we are not big rabbits, right? This is the rabbit research I’m referring to. And our bodies have a very complex system for managing how our muscles contract as they get loaded with more and more force.

And it involves a lot more than just muscle temperature. And this is why human studies show that we don’t really know whether warming muscle tissue up before loading it. Reduces the risk of injury. Some studies suggest that it does. Other studies suggest that it doesn’t. And when you look at the data on the whole, the trend does seem to be more toward the former position that it does, but this is pretty insignificant when viewed on the whole.

Now that doesn’t mean that warming up properly can’t significantly reduce your risk of injury though, because it can by helping you improve your technique. This is very important because if you’ve done any amount of heavy compound weightlifting, you know that as the weights get heavy and as your sets get hard, it’s very easy for your form to start breaking down in little ways.

We’ve all had our knees start to cave in on a heavy squat and our wrists go crooked on a heavy bench press or overhead press and our low backs go round on a heavy deadlift and we all know that those are the most common mistakes that people make that get them hurt. Now, a proper warmup routine can really help here because it allows you to groove in the correct movement patterns on these big lifts.

It’s practice. And the more you practice, the more that becomes your default way to squat, bench, overhead press and deadlift. Research also shows that warming up correctly can improve your workout performance because your muscles are powered by a bunch of tiny chemical reactions that are sensitive to temperature and research shows that warmer appears to be better.

In other words, your muscles are just able to contract more effectively when they’re warmer and also warming up allows you to bring more blood flow into the muscles that you’re going to be training, which means more oxygen and of course more energy. Okay, so what is the best way to warm up for your weightlifting and strength training workouts?

I’m being specific there because if it’s a cardio workout, you don’t really have to warm up for it unless it’s maybe some very high intensity thing like All out sprints, in which case, yeah, it’s probably smart to do, a five or 10 minute walk or jog to get warmed up and then go and do your sprints.

What about weightlifting though? What about strength training? I alluded to it just a minute or two ago, and it is to warm up the muscles that you are going to be training. Doing cardio, for example, doesn’t make sense if you’re going to be squatting or deadlifting or bench pressing over head pressing.

Yeah, it’s going to raise your body temperature and there is some research that shows that this might improve your performance slightly, but warming up the way that I’m about to tell you is also going to raise your body temperature, so you’re going to achieve that anyway. So what you want to do then is a few warm up sets of the first exercise that you’re going to be doing for a major muscle group in a workout.

So let’s say you’re going to do a pull workout that calls for deadlift, barbell row, dumbbell row, and pull ups. So first, it makes sense, of course, to do the exercises in that order, starting with the most difficult, the deadlift, and ending with the least difficult, the pull up. You wouldn’t want to save your deadlifts for last in your workout, for example, because they require the most energy, they require the most focus.

Do them first when you’re fresh. So to warm up for this workout, then you are going to do a few warm up sets of the deadlift, which not only warms up all of your pull muscles and gets them ready for the workout, it also allows you to practice your technique. And out of all the exercises you’re going to do in the workout, of course, the deadlift is the most technical and requires the most practice to get it good at, especially when loads get heavy.

So how should these warmup sets work? I like to do three warmup sets before I do my hard sets for a major workout. Muscle group. The first one is about 50 percent of my hard set weight for about 10 reps, not 50 percent of one rep max my hard set weight. So for example, in my last workout, if I pulled 405 for four, I’m going to put 205 or maybe 225 if I’m feeling lazy and I’m just, bringing plates over on the bar and I’m going to do 10 reps.

Then I’m going to rest about a minute and I’m going to do another set with the same weight, 10 reps, a little bit faster, a little bit more explosive this time. And then I’m going to rest a minute or so, and I’m going to bump the weight up to about 70 percent of my hard set weight, and I’m going to do a set of four reps with that weight.

So in the deadlift example that I’m giving, I’m going to put about 285 to 295 pounds on the bar and do a set of four. And then I’m going to rest two or three minutes and go into my first hard set. So I’ll increase the weight up to just sticking with the example, increase it up to four or five again.

Let’s say last week I got four, four, four. So this week I’m hoping to get. Let’s say five, five, four, maybe even five, five, five. Now I used to do one additional warmup set, a fourth set of one rep with about 90 percent of my hard set weight. And I dropped it out a few months ago after reading some stuff from Dr.

Eric Helms and Greg Knuckles over at stronger by science. com. It was in their research review mass actually. And after reading that, I was like, I. I don’t think it’s necessary to do this fourth set, dropped it out and have noticed no difference in terms of performance or even how the lifts feel.

So it works for me. It’s a little bit shorter and a little bit less fatigue, obviously going into the hard set, even though a set of one with 90 percent doesn’t impact you much. It’s a little bit, it might be the difference of one extra rep in a hard set, for example. So that’s it. That’s the warmup routine.

And again, you want to do that routine, those three warmup sets with the first exercise that you’re going to do for a major muscle group in a workout. In the example, we just went over, it was just a pull workout, right? So it’s your back and your biceps are the major muscle groups involved. You warm up on the deadlift and then you don’t need to warm up again.

Obviously, like you go from the deadlift into the barbell row. You didn’t need to warm up on the barbell row. You are plenty warmed up. And then of course you need to warm up on the dumbbell row or the pull ups. And if you were going to do some biceps as well, you wouldn’t need to warm up for bicep curls either because your biceps are going to be plenty warmed up from everything else that you did.

However, let’s say that you were doing an upper body workout that has you doing some some pressing and pulling. So let’s say you’re going to do a bench press and a dumbbell press and a deadlift and a barbell row. You would warm up on the bench press first. You do your warmup sets and then you would not need to warm up for your deadlift.

dumbbell pressing after, because you’re going to be warmed up. And then you would do your warmup sets on your deadlift because your pressing did not warm up your pull muscles. It doesn’t really involve them much at all. A little bit, but not much. So you warm up on your deadlift, you do your hard sets.

And then when you do your barbell row, you don’t need to warm up for that because your pull muscles are ready to go. I also don’t find it necessary to warm up my calves or my abs for any weighted calf or ab training, because I’m usually doing higher rep ranges, lower weights, and very non technical movements like, a standing calf raise or a cable crunch.

Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick comment Review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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