Best Warm Up For Exercise

Today we’re going to talk about the best warm up for exercise.

I used to not warm up at all. I would just go and start doing my thing when I worked out… and if you think about it… this is kind of “functional” training. You don’t usually get a chance to “warm up” before your fight or flight hormones get activated and you gotta go do something physically strenuous in real life.

BUT, here’s the thing: even exercise itself isn’t “natural”. We’re doing an unnatural thing by doing exercise 2-3x per week. So here’s some reasons why I now believe it’s important to warm up (and you should too):

• Preparation: for the activity at hand, gets the muscles and joints “oiled up”. Though not as important as…
• Injury prevention: by warming up specific body parts, stretching chronically tight ones and strengthening weak ones you’ll start to gradually help your muscle imbalances and keep your self away from injuries like lower back injuries.

What Makes For a Good Warm Up

In my mind, there are some things that you definitely want to have in your warmups:

• Get hot: it’s best to get a little bit winded or even break a light sweat if possible with your warmups…
• Soft tissue issues: whenever possible you want to do a little self massage to help break down the buildup of scar tissue, get rid of tightness in chronically tight muscles and fight those imbalances…
• Respeck tha joints: pay attention to doing loosening routines and even strengthening routines for your shoulder joints, hip joints, and other areas that take a beating with your workouts.
• A little “mimicky” movement: do a light set or two of bodyweight exercises mimicking the movement patterns you’re going to train that day.

Warm Up Sets?

If you’re lifting weights, a part of your warm up should be a warm-up set or two of your chosen exercise. For example:

You’d have a quick, general warm-up that might include a little rope skipping to get your heart rate up, hanging from a pullup bar for 15 seconds to get a little space in between your vertebre, and then some myofascial self massage on a foam roller. THEN, you move onto your weight exercises.

Because you’re a typical dude, you’ll do Bench Press today The best way to do your warm up sets is to start with the bar and get your form and everything right and do 5-10 reps. Then hop up and throw some “quarters” on (25lbs on each side). 5 reps. Move these weights more explosively and faster than normal while still keeping good form. Then get up, remove the quarters and throw on the 45lb plates (you’re really impressing the ladies now!) and do 5 more good reps. Now you’re probably getting close to your “work weights” for this bench press session. Maybe you need to do another warm up set in between (you can even half the reps again, to make sure you’re fresh — but the weight jump isn’t too big to your working sets) and then get to it.

Specific warm up sets are a very personal thing, meaning you’ll have to try it a couple times to figure out how much warmup you need, how long of rest in between, how many reps, and how big of jump of poundage for each progressive warm up set.

If you find your second working set feels more “in the groove” than the first… then you probably should of done a few more warmup sets because the goal is to make that first “work set” with your target weight feel like little bo’ peep — just right!

Don’t Forget To Warm Up!

In closing, I’m just saying you should really warm up before you do any type of exercise. For me, I’m not really worried about warming up for the deal at hand so much as I’m worried about doing all the little “assistance work” that keeps my body from falling apart due to the abuse I’ve handed it since (and well before) puberty.

Doing shoulder dislocations and scapulla strengthening exercises to keep the shoulders healthy… stretching those tight hip flexors just waiting to pull my back out of alignment… rolling the Sh*t out of my legs, back and assorted tight musculature helping it to recover better with the foam roller… and finally if I have some time maybe doing some light warm up stuff to try to get a light sweat going before heading over to the weights.

So yeah, the best warm up for exercise is to get in all the “assistance work” you normally don’t do to keep all your body parts working better (or like Nate Green says, “To fix my sh*t”) and then get a little sweat going.