Today’s topic ties in with a recent post of mine, ‘Can You Run Safely?’ Part of staying injury-free during exercise is to ensure that your body is prepared for the forthcoming exertion. This preparatory phase is known as the warm-up.
Why I want to address this topic, is simply because the layperson doesn’t seem to have a good, consistent definition of a warm-up. While each individual will need various degrees of warm-up, it pays to stick with a couple of key principles, of which this article sets out to outline.
Note that everything I say here is directed towards the layperson. In other words, if you’re an athlete, then the following may not apply.
Why Warm Up?
Because if you do a proper warm up, you’re going to be able to both (a) keep yourself injury-free, and (b) be able to push harder during your workout, thereby getting more benefits from it.
The Many Views towards the warm-up
I’m sure you would have seen many views towards how one should warm up. For example, some people will tell you that stretching is absolutely necessary, and others will tell you that you shouldn’t stretch at all.
But remember why you’re warming up: To prepare your joints, muscles and connective tissues for whatever exercise you are about to perform.
Thus, the exercise you’re performing is going to determine how much you’re going to have to warm up. If you’re going to the gym, depending on whether you’re going to be lifting heavy weights, or partaking in some pilates classes, you’d need a different level of warm-up.
So the point here is: Ask yourself what exercise you’re about to perform, and then apply the general guidelines for that exercise. Now let’s get into those guidelines.
Type of Exercise
I’m going to split exercise simply into aerobic exercise, sports-specific exercise and strength-based exercise.
Aerobic exercise will be those such as long-distance running, cycling, swimming, etc. These exercises depend largely on the ability of the heart and muscles to sustain prolonged bouts of sub-maximal exertion.
Strength exercise will be those such as weights training, where the muscles are performing at high intensities but with (ideally) controlled form.
Sports-specific exercise will be everything else, from sprinting, to tennis, to soccer, to basketball. I separate this category because it involves some specific areas to note with regards to the specific sport. More on this in the specific section.
General Guidelines
So depending on the activity, you’d take different paths. The commonality between all of them is that you start with the most basic activity.
Aerobic Exercise
In general, one doesn’t need too much warm-up for aerobic activity. Oftentimes people can simply start light and then progressively ramp up the intensity until they reach their work level. So if you intend to do a 8 mph run on the treadmill for 30 minutes, you should start by walking at perhaps 3 mph, slowly scaling up over a period of 5-10 minutes, before going for 30 minutes. One could then reverse the procedure at the end of the workout.
For the type of aerobic activity that most people do, I’d see little need to go beyond that. While some stretching before the workout doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t seem to help too much either. The qualifier here is that stretching may be necessary if muscle flexibility or joint prevents one from doing to the activity. This is not likely the case for running, but may very well be true for weights training.
Sports-Specific Exercise
Everything from doing hill sprints, to playing tennis falls under this category. Since the nature of such activity is (usually) unpredictable, and it is performed at higher intensities, more warm-up is needed.
In general we should split the warm-up into 2 simple phases:
- A general warm-up
- A sports specific warm-up
While athletes can get into all the specifics, let’s keep it simple. In this case, a general warm-up would be exactly like described above for aerobic exercise. As a guideline, one should start by performing some brief cardiovascular activity until you break a light sweat.
Following which, some dynamic stretching can take place. For a great demonstration of a dynamic stretching routine, take a look at some Catalyst athletics videos.
Admittedly, that may not be necessary for the recreational exerciser. Often, some light, sports specific activity will suffice. That means hitting some easy serves, throwing a few light pitches or doing some easy passes.
Here, I would like to highlight though, that in some cases, some static stretching is warranted. For example, someone should stretch out his/her tight shoulders before hitting that big tennis serve. If you have to stretch to ensure that your joints can go through the necessary range of motion, then do so.
Strength-Based exercise
The primary form of activity that falls under this category would be weights training, and arguably this is where many people get the warm-up completely wrong. Part of the reason why there are more weights-training-related injuries is simply because people simply don’t invest the time to neither warm-up properly or learn the exercises properly.
Today, we just want to talk about the former. First off, I would like to say that Lyle McDonald provided an excellent 2 part series on warming up (link to part 1 and part 2). I’d encourage you to really read and digest that info, but I will provide some guidelines here to start people off.
Here is a simple 3 phase warmup:
First, the general warm-up follows just like before: Do some form of cardio until you break a light sweat.
Second, some form of dynamic stretching is performed. This is demonstrated in this video.
Third, progressive ramping up of sets to the work sets. This means that if you’re going to be bench pressing 100kg, start with the bar (20kg). The typically progression would be:
20kg x 10-20 reps
50kg x 5
70kg x 3
80kg x 2
90kg x 1
100kg x 1
Since there aren’t many 100kg bench pressers out there, here’s a guideline for someone who will eventually intends to do 3 work sets of 50kg x 6 reps.
20kg x 5-10
30kg x 3
40kg x 2
50kg x 1
It may be a little bit of a stretch, but my policy has always been to ensure safety in performing weights training. Following the above guideline should not tire you out, but instead grease movement patterns and prime the joints, muscles and nervous system for the performance ahead.
As you can see, the heavier you are working, the more warmup you’re going to need. If in doubt, stick to a little more warm-up with low reps (1-2 reps).
Overlapping body parts may need less warm-up. An example would be Chin-Ups and Rows. Still, NEVER jump into an exercise without such a warm-up.
Final Words
Don’t forget that these are guidelines. I would say that most people can feel when they are warmed up when it comes to aerobic and sports activity. In those cases, depending on your age and training background, you can simply follow the guidelines until you feel like you’re ready to go.
For weights training however, I will highly recommend that you follow the guidelines. Skimping on warm-up in the weights room is one of the more dangerous things you can do.
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