What Is a Warm-Up Actually Supposed to Do?
We all know we're supposed to warm up before we train. What gets a little less clear is what the warm-up is actually supposed to accomplish.
Is it to get your heart rate up? Improve mobility? Activate certain muscles? Practice the exercises you're about to do? Get your joints moving? Make you feel ready?
Potentially, all of the above. But that doesn't mean every warm up needs to check every possible box.
We tend to think about warm ups based on what we're about to ask someone to do. Rather than starting with a universal list of exercises everyone should perform, we work backward from the training ahead of us.
What positions are we going to use? How much power are we going to produce? Is there a particular area or movement that this person usually benefits from getting into beforehand? And can we accomplish several of those things at once without turning the warm-up into its own elaborate production?
Start With What You're Preparing For
A warm up for a heavy lower body strength session probably shouldn't look exactly like a warm up before a conditioning workout. Someone preparing to sprint has different demands coming their way than someone getting ready for a relatively easy upper body session.
Even two people doing the same workout may not need exactly the same preparation.
One person might walk in after sitting at a desk all morning and benefit from a few minutes of broader movement before getting specific, take a little longer to get warm, or maybe even stretch a little. Someone else may have already been moving all day and feel ready almost immediately. Another person may know that their shoulder, hip or back tends to feel better when we include a particular movement before loading it.
That doesn't make one warm-up right and another wrong. The warm up is there to serve the training and the person doing it.
There are still some general ideas we use pretty consistently. We want someone physically and mentally ready to train. We usually want to move through some of the ranges of motion they'll encounter. As the warm up progresses, we'll generally introduce more of the positions, movement patterns and forces that are coming next.
But we don't need a different exercise for every one of those goals.
One Movement Can Do More Than One Job
This is probably where warm ups can become much more efficient.
An exercise doesn't have to be categorized as a “mobility drill,” an “activation exercise” or a “core exercise” to be useful in a warm up. A single movement can give us several things at once.
A crawling variation, for example, might involve the shoulders, trunk and hips while also asking for coordination between different parts of the body. A yoga push up can take the shoulders through a larger range of motion while still giving us some pressing. A lunge with rotation can expose the hips and trunk to positions we're going to use later without requiring separate drills for each.
We can get a lot of movement into a small amount of time when we stop trying to isolate every quality.
That doesn't mean we're trying to cram as much as humanly possible into 5 to 10 minutes. It just means we're choosing movements intentionally. Sometimes simple is plenty.
Pressing Is a Good Example
An older video of ours shows a short warm-up we used before bench pressing. It includes scorpions, yoga push-ups and band pull aparts, along with quite a few other options.
Those exercises aren't a magic formula for bench pressing. There isn't a rule that says you need to perform those three movements before you press, and there are plenty of other ways we could prepare someone for the exact same workout.
What they show pretty well is the thought process. We're moving the shoulders. We're getting some rotation through the body. We're introducing pressing through the push up. We're involving the upper back. And we're doing it through movements that accomplish more than one thing at a time.
Then we can move toward the actual lift and progressively prepare for whatever loads we're using that day.
The exercises themselves are less important than why they're there. That's also why our warm ups change. We don't need to keep doing an exercise forever just because it once earned a spot in someone's preparation.
Warm Ups Are Also a Chance to Move Differently
Preparation isn't the only reason we like warm ups. Strength training is necessarily repetitive to some degree. If we want to become stronger at a squat, hinge, press or pull, we need enough exposure to those patterns to actually improve them.
But we also want people to maintain a reasonably broad movement vocabulary. The beginning of a workout gives us a convenient place to sprinkle some of that in without pretending every movement needs to become a major training objective.
We can crawl, reach, rotate, move laterally, change our base of support, use different push up positions, get down onto the floor and back up again, challenge coordination a little bit, play with some power, etc. For our more athletic training, we can take that even further.
Not everything needs to be loaded heavily or progressed in the traditional sense to have value. Sometimes we're simply giving someone another movement problem to solve.
A few minutes of varied movement, repeated consistently over months and years, adds up to a lot of exposure. And it doesn't require adding another “mobility day” to the calendar. In that way, warm ups can be an opportunity for more without sapping someone’s calendar.
Sometimes More Preparation Is Appropriate…Sometimes…
None of this means every warm up should be 3 minutes long or 15 minutes long (as the video alludes to).
If we're preparing someone for very heavy lifting, higher speed work or something particularly demanding, we're probably going to spend more time building toward it. If someone is coming back from an injury, learning a new movement or simply needs more exposure before they feel comfortable, their preparation may look different too.
Context matters. The point isn't to make the warm up as short as possible, or necessarily longer. It's to make the warm up earn the time we're giving it. It’s not fluff. If something has a clear purpose, keep it. If an exercise gives someone useful movement exposure, prepares them for what's coming or simply helps them feel and perform better, great.
But we don't need to build warm ups by accumulating exercises until we've addressed every muscle, joint and movement imaginable. Start with what you're about to do. Consider who's doing it. Pick a few movements that give you the most useful preparation and exposure for the time you have.
AND SOMETIMES…That means clipping the warm up almost entirely and getting in some more “warm up sets” of you very first exercise of the day. There are no rules against this and indeed times when it can make the most sense.
Remember, warm ups are there to help you get the most out of your training. The go train!
Check out our bench press warm-up video and let us know what you think.
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