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The word"Warm-Up" is sometimes used as a catch all term for "anything that happens to get you ready for a workout." For some people this is a light jog on the treadmill, some stretching or foam rolling, or body weight calisthenics.
While most experts agree that no perfect warm-up exists for everyone, there are good, better, and best ways to warm-up depending on your workout goals.
I've written about the best general way to warm-up here, but now let me introduce you to what I consider the optimal warm-up if your goal is STRENGTH and lifting heavy.
The Best Strength Warm-Up
The best way to prepare for strength is to make the muscles strong. A flawless concept, right? To maximize strength, your muscles need two things:
An increase in temperature
An increase in neural activity
The temperature is referring to more blood flow, and the neural activity is the signal strength of the central nervous system to recruit as much muscle mass as possible. The term is "motor unit recruitment." To be strong, your body needs to recruit as many motor units as possible.
The best way to recruit as many motor units as possible is to make the muscle struggle. The harder the struggle, the more motor units you'll use to do the exercise. But if the struggle is TOO real, your muscles will be fatigued and your strength workout will be sub-optimal.
So now we're at an impasse. How can you bring blood flow to the area, make the muscles struggle, but not push them past their limit before doing your sets?
Enter the magic number: 25.
Do sets of 25 reps
A typical strength session involves doing compound, multi-joint exercises for low reps and high weight. Think squatting heavy for sets of 3-5 reps. To warm-up for this, we'll use sets of high rep, low weight exercises that are similar in nature to the main exercise.
On a heavy squat day, for instance, I would recommend warming up with a few sets of 25 low back / glute activators like the reverse hyper machine, followed by a few sets of 25 arm-assisted body weight squats. Depending on your needs, we may add an extra movement or two to prepare for heavy lifting, but this is when we move to the main exercise and begin working our way up to a heavy session.
Reverse Hyper Machine
Arm-Assisted Squats (TRX Squats)
Similarly, if it were a heavy pullup day and you wanted to maximize your upper body strength, I would use an exercise that activate all the upper body pulling muscles like a pulldown machine or seated cable row and do 2-4 sets of 25 reps. These exercises are "easy" to do and still activate all the required muscles.
Seated Cable Lat Pulldown
Seated Cable Rows
Why 25 reps?
There's no magic to the number 25, but it hits our two requirements listed above. It provides a nice pump of blood to the muscles, which increase their temperature. It also pushes (for most people) the muscles to their limit without causing too much lasting fatigue.
The goal here, though, is to choose a weight where 25 is about the maximum number of reps you can perform. If it's too light, you're just doing cardio. If it's too heavy, you can't get all 25 reps, you're doing a working set.
After a two minute rest, your muscles will be awake and as as strong as possible.
Why It Works
This phenomenon is called post-activation potentiation, and it's a condition where the motor units have been activated and are then more easily activated for the rest of the workout session.
Your motor units are like a light switch - they're either ON or OFF. When they're ON, a signal is sent to the muscle to contract. When they're OFF, the muscle doesn't contract. There is no half-measure.
What differentiates a strong muscle contraction with a weak muscle contraction is the amount of motor units that are switched ON. But motor units have a threshold for activation. A certain amount of signal must be sent for a motor unit to activate and contract a muscle. Post-activation potentiation means that initial threshold has been lowered, and motor units are more easily turned ON, meaning more muscles are contracted with less stimulus needed.
This is why sometimes a second set of an exercise can feel easier than the first set.
An added benefit of doing sets of 25 reps is for people looking to build muscle mass. It increases the amount of time the muscle fibers experience under tension, due to so many reps and sets.
Time under tension, combined with increased calories and protein, are the signals your body needs to build muscle.
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