IDEAL WARMUP

[liftathomeguy]

Hi - I have a question about warm up sets. My training buddy and I often disagree on this. MY theory is that a warm up should get you well on your way to being a bit pumped. Let's say we're training biceps - I like to do say 30 - 50 reps with a light (but not too light) weight of curls, switching up the grip position every now and then - really focussing on getting blood into the muscle, so that by the end of the set I'm feeling the burn in my biceps. Similar for chest, legs... anything really. My mate is very reluctant to do this, as he wants to 'save his energy' for the 'working' sets, and just does a very light set of 12 - 15 before heading into our heavy stuff. Both approaches seem to have some kind of merit to me, so I was just wondering what the consensus in here is?

[Pseudonym]

I tend to go until I just start feeling a bit of fatigue setting in. Then I stop, rest, and repeat. I might do 2 warm-up sets on, say, 40% of my "working set" weight, followed by another short set at 70%.

It depends on what muscles I'm working, though - eg: my left elbow is a bit dodgy, so I've started doing a lot of light DB curls and overhead DB extensions to warm up the biceps and triceps. I do that before virtually every upper body workout, and it seems to do the trick for me.

[shruglife]

I would normally do no more than 12-15 reps on each warmup set and the number of warmup sets is dependent on how heavy your workset will be - you don't want the jumps in weight to be too big.

For example if you were going to work up to a few worksets on Bench Press at around 100kg I would:

1st Set - Rep the bar out 15 times stretching at the bottom, contracting at the top, visualising ideal form.

2nd Set - Bang out 10 reps at 40kg

3rd Set - 10 reps at 60kg

4th Set - 8@80kg

5th Set - 5@90kg

6th Set - Worksets

I go by feel, aiming to warm the muscle up progressively getting closer to my Worset weight without depleting my muscle energy stores too much which I would think banging out 50 reps would :wink:

[SoaringSwine]

From a strength perspective where the goal is to prepare yourself for your working set without compromising the performances of those set/s, here's what I'd do.

If I'm warmup up for a 140kg work set I'd do something like this...

2-3 sets of 5-8 with the bar to 40kg

4 x 60kg

3 x 80kg

2 x 100kg

1 x 120kg (I add my belt here if I'm using it for my work sets, just to get used to the feel of it)

Work sets