I was taught that one should do higher repetition movements with lighter weights in order to warm up. And then one of the things that did make a big positive difference for me in terms of strength and hypertrophy training was to do a moderate repetition warmup with a fairly lightweight, but then to actually keep the number of warmup repetitions fairly low and work progressively toward the first so-called work set.

When you say three to five, that's three to five work sets, correct? Yep. Are you also going to tell me three to five warmups? No. Are you also going to tell me it has to be done between three and 5 p.m.? So in terms of- With three to five friends?

In all seriousness, what does a good warmup look like? And I realize this will vary depending on how cool your training environment is, time of day, et cetera. But as a kind of umbrella for a good warmup, what should people do? Well, you've already sort of jumped the gun with my answer.

It is honestly very dependent upon the person. So some folks respond very well to a minimum warmup. Others, I've had lots of actually professional fighters I've worked with where I actually have a major baseball player right now. He's one of the best pitchers in the game, probably the best.

And the longer we warm up, the better his numbers get. We actually did a vertical jump test with him. He's going to kill me because he got so mad. I wanted to see how long it sort of took him to reach a peak vertical jump. And most times this takes people something like five to 10 sort of reps.

And I said, take it up all the way to a maximum vertical jump. And then what I want you to do is continue jumping until you have three consecutive jumps or you're down lower than 90%. And so what we're trying to look at is sort of when is he going to break?

Because in baseball, he's going to throw like 100 pitchers or so. And we're trying to figure out when is his peak velocity on his fastball going to drop and sort of base his conditioning on that. So it's a different style of conditioning. It's power endurance is really what it is.

He called me in the middle of it. I'm like, oh, he done, whatever. And he's just like, no, like how many of these am I supposed to do? And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, I'm on rep 130 or something. And I was like, what?

And I'm like, what rep did you peak on? He peaked on rep 70, something like that. 69, I think, technically, because he's goofy. So he's a classic example I've worked in for many, many years. We have a ton of data on him, a ton of biological data, a ton of neuromuscular stuff, like all kinds of stuff.

And it just, the more he warms up, an absurd amount of warmup, the better he gets. And the better he gets in power production and the better he gets in speed and velocity. So his warmup prior to games is, it's totally absurd. And just the more volume we throw at him, the better he does.

I have other folks, you get past like two or three reps and fatigue starts to set in. And now you're actually like reducing power production. So there is a ton of variation that goes in that. I can give you some guidelines though. You need to differentiate if you're training for speed, power, strength, or hypertrophy.

Here's why. If we understand a little bit about what's causing the adaptation, that's going to tell you what you need to do or avoid. For example, volume is the primary driver in hypertrophy. Intensity is the primary driver in speed, power, and strength. All right, what that means is, you need to preserve intensity for the first three, you need to preserve volume in the second one at most.

So if your warmup is so extensive in the hypertrophy training, that it compromises your training volume because of fatigue, even if it compromises the last set of the last exercise, then you're actually probably walking yourself backwards by doing that extensive. You would have been better off starting your first working set slightly suboptimal, right?

'Cause it's not really, you're just trying to accrue volume at that point. Strength and power is the opposite. Until you're moving very, very fast or powerfully, you're not really causing the adaptation. So there's no point in starting your working set until you're really basically at 100%. So the warmup should be as long as it takes you to get to where your mobility is in the right spot, like your joints feel good, you feel fresh, you feel activated, and you really feel peak power.

Anything before that is a warmup set. In the sport of Olympic weightlifting, a lot of times the coaches will measure barbell velocity. Travis Mash has done a fantastic job with this. He's got a lot of data on what's called velocity-based training. Brian Mann at Missouri and Miami, tons of work here.

And generally those communities are not going to count any repetition as a working set until you exceed 70% of your one rep max. Where that's changed because of a lot of people doing the velocity-based stuff is now they're basing that simply on an achieved velocity. And so really the warmup is irrelevant.

They don't even, it's sort of just like do whatever you want and we're gonna measure the barbell until you actually hit an outcome. And now you're at what a working set. So different ways to think about it, depending on what you're training for, that'll give you a little bit of a guideline.

If you're training for anything past hypertrophy, then really, and especially even hypertrophy, it just comes down to, are you feeling ready to work? Are you cold? Are you moving through the correct positions? And if all those things are fine, I don't care if you start a little bit early and save some gas at the end of it, especially if you're a person like you who may be a bit more inclined to fatigue quickly relative to Trevor, who just has no response to fatigue whatsoever.

- Is it useful to do more warmup at the beginning of a workout, say before the first exercise, and then once one has achieved both local and systemic warmup, in air quotes, then perhaps on the second or third exercise, fourth exercise, et cetera, one or maybe even zero warmups.

- Yeah, fair point. We generally think about warmups in a couple of ways. This is a really actually, this is a very clever question. You wanna have some sort of general global warmup scheme. We tend to prefer dynamic warmups. So this is whole body movements rather than like sitting and stretching, static stretching, things like that.

- So something that involves momentum. - Yeah, momentum or movement, right? So this is like, think about this in like old gym class. It's like your high knees and your butt kickers and just different things like that, where you're moving in different planes, you're moving joints through tons of range of motion, you're getting a lot of movement there.

So you're getting the local warmup, you're also getting the total systemic activation, everything else is going on there. So that is what we consider to be a general warmup. Five minutes is a very sufficient number, perhaps 10 if you're a slow goer, achy and some things like that. And you really gotta get the ankle warmed up if you're doing lower body stuff, really make sure that that's moving correctly.

The hips and knees will follow, upper body stuff really get the shoulder blades and the neck, like making sure you're going there and the elbows will follow after that. So five to seven minutes of a general warmup, a lot of the times like classic exercise science, it will even just put you on a bike, cycling for five minutes.

I don't like that personally, dynamic movement is more preferred. If you really just move for five to seven minutes, you'll be fine there. Now, specificity within each movement. It's very important that your first exercise of the day is generally the thing you've prioritized. That's oftentimes the most important you're going to do.

It oftentimes is also the most complex and the most moving parts. So it tends to be multi-joint, therefore you need to have movement, precision and skill dialed, right? You don't typically start your workouts off with the forearm curl, right? Like that's, you don't need a tremendous amount of warmup to get going on that.

You're going to start off with medicine ball throws or a snatch or some agility work. You need to have the whole system going because multiple joints are moving, position matters, technique. There's just a lot of skill requirement, et cetera. So the individualized workout or the specific workout for the specific movement for that very first one, my general rule of thumb is like whatever it takes to move perfect in that first exercise.

Past that, you don't necessarily need to do individualized warmups for your next movements unless it is a movement you're trying to learn or just even get a little bit better at. Like drop the load a little bit, work on some accruing some practice reps, fantastic. Or it's another dissimilar complex movement.

So let's say your first exercise was a front squat and you got loaded for that and now you're going to move into a pull-up but your mechanics aren't the best there and so you really need to change and do some maybe more specific activation warmups for that or something else or it's running or something totally different.

So yeah, you don't need to rewarm up for every single exercise as you go. Generally once you're good to go, the same muscles that you're going to use in the next exercise are warm, same joints, then you're good to go. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)