Warming Up 101

Warming Up Should be SIMPLE

On WARMING UP:

"The ability to take a simple thing and make it complicated is the mark of the midwit ”

When I first began working out in 2005, warming up was straightforward. You would perform a few light sets of the exercise you were doing to do. The weight would be maybe 30-50% of your 1RM, you would a set of 10 (some old timers liked to do 20 reps).

When your muscles felt warm, pumped with blood, and you were psychologically ready, you would start your heavier sets.

You figured out through trial and error that if you skipped warmups entirely, you would not be prepared to lift heavy.

If you did too many warmups, you’d tire yourself out before your hard sets started.

Older lifters would take longer to warmup than younger lifters.

There was not much to discuss beyond this. Warming up was not a complex subject.

But Times have Changed, for the worst

Over the past decade and a half I have seen warming up becoming increasingly intricate.

Personal trainers will have their clients perform a large variety of exercises, many of them far removed from the actual exercises in the workout itself.

PTs will diagnose you with syndromes, inactive muscles, faulty movements patterns, make you believe your body is profoundly dysfunctional, and then prescribe warmups as being part of the solution to fix these various issues.

Here is the Rube…Almost all of this Unnecessary and Overomplicated

This Complexity Bias is unproven, bad practice, and this entire Way of thinking is often Contrived BS

To really understand this, let’s go back in time a bit.

Historically, before “sports science” became an established professional domain in the 1970s and 1980s, warming up typically meant doing whatever the actual activity was, at a lower intensity.

Boxers warmup for boxing with shadow boxing

Sprinters warmup for sprinting with easy sprints

Olympic lifters warmup for the Olympic lifts by start with an empty bar.

Pitchers warmup for pitching by…pitching.

Bodybuilders warmed up for an exercise by doing a few lightweight sets of that exercise.

This is Simple, and it WORKS. Research on Motor learning has proven over and over again that the best way to learn any specific motor skill is to practice that specific motor skill

There is nothing byzantine about this. If you want to learn to squat, practice squats. Do you want to learn to speak Chinese? You practice speaking Chinese.

You do A to get better at A.

For something like resistance training, you can physically and mentally prepare for an exercise by doing lightweight repetitions of that exercise.

That this basic principle became convoluted is still astounding to me.

Beginning in the late 1980s and 1990s, this practice started to Change

Oddly enough, it started with static stretching.

Up to the 1990s, static stretching was recommended before exercise. (I still get asked the question as to whether stretching should be done before or after working out)

When this was formally studied and experiments were done having people stretch or not stretch before exercise, it was found that static stretching did not improve performance.

In some cases, it decreased performance.

This does not mean “stretching is bad”, but rather static stretching before intense workouts is not the best time to stretch

This research on stretching led to re-examing the warmup process.

The term that arose was “Dynamic Warmups”

Ironically, most athletes ALREADY did this by default.

You warmed up by practicing movements that were the same or similar to whatever the activity was.

However, the concept of Dynamic Warmups gave personal trainers, athletic trainers and strength and conditioning coaches professional jargon they could latch onto that justified their supposed expertise and job positions.

You were not just warming up, you were DYNAMICALLY warming up.

Dynamic warmups led to a litany of iterations on dynamic stretches, movement drills, and exercise sequences that grew in length and complexity over time.

At the same time, the Physical Therapy field began to influence mainstream practice.

As DPTs are the most educated of all fitness professionals, exercises from their rehab practice began to show up in regular training programs.

This is where the concepts of Prehab, Muscle Amnesia, Muscle Activation, and movement patterns came from.

This eventually all morphed into MOBILITY training, which became another class of exercise

More exercises were added into warmups, and the warmed up swelled to include these prehab, activation, mobilization exercises.

From this was added the idea of Movement Screens, which were multi step assessments that could be used to diagnose supposed issues. (one of these most famous assessments was later shown to be functionally worthless)

the result of all this was Warm-Ups becoming a Rube Goldberg process of redundancies and pointless exercises to fix non existent problems

As actual physical therapists began to enter mainstream fitness in the mid 2010s, they realized many physical therapy concepts had been bastardized and were being improperly implemented, or were poorly understood.

Many spoke out, but But at this point, the trend had already taken Over

What was unknown to mainstream fitness professionals was how UNPROVEN many of these concepts are.

Physical Therapy is not a “set in stone” scientific profession where all the practices are irrefutably correct. Like all scientific fields, principles and application are fuzzy.

It may surprise you to know that many treatments and assessment in physical therapy are unproven, unfalsifiable, and the hard evidence for them is limited.

But, most personal trainers are unaware of this.

And as personal trainers are rarely scientific thinkers though, and they tended to assume that things like “muscle amnesia” were indisputable facts.

Very little critical thinking was applied as to how muscles could still contract if they were “amnesiac”,

-FYI-Gluteal Amnesia is not a real condition. You can’t “feel” your butt because your glutes are weak and untrained,

or how “prehab” was somehow an entirely different category from strength training,

or how muscles needed to be activated with unique exercises when basic biomechanics would show that activation would always occur with biomechanically sound movements.

It was also overlooked for years that differences in skeletal structure were meaningful and affected how a person could perform an exercise, and that no one amount of mobility work would change bone structure and tendon attachments.

All of This Snowballed into the Current State of Confusion

Training does not need to be this involuted.

Your body is not broken. Your muscles are not “inactive”.

I have had thousands of people do my programs the past 6 years.

My basic warmup protocol this entire time has been 1 to 3 to possibly three sets of light weight, for moderate reps.

And then start your working sets.

It is in fact that simple.

But what if…..

If you need specific and different exercises and stretches and more beyond the above protocol, that should be determined on a case by case basis, and not assumed to be necessary from the beginning.

Ocams Razor.

Any questions, feel free to ask in the comments