Happy Tuesday folks, today I wanted to talk about efficient vs non-efficient warmups. Here I’ll talk about how I warm up for my heavy Smolov jr workouts.

What I typically see is folks treating every warm up set as if they were working sets, doing way too many reps, effectively causing unnecessary fatigue. Your warm up is a warm up, not a workout, and it’s there to prime you to move some heavy weight while not causing fatigue. I think we can all agree that coming in cold and loading up the barbell with 80% of our 1RM off the bat is a bad idea.
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If you have to do 4 tough sets of 5 reps with 245lbs. You don’t want your last warm up to be 225lbs for 7 repetitions lol. That is going to be exhausting and pretty much a working set of its own. You also don’t want to do your lighter preceding warm up sets for too many reps fatiguing yourself either. You want to warm up in an incremental fashion leaving plenty of reps left in the tank. Gradually build up. Your warm ups shouldn’t be anywhere near failure, you should have over 5 reps left on any given warm up set.
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Note: You may need to do more than 4 warm up sets yourself to be ready, or perhaps even less if you’re doing high rep work. It is something you’re going to have to experiment with yourself, but the principle remains the same. The point is that you gradually increase load and lower the reps as you go while leaving plenty in the tank. Its also important to note that the standard weight increases (135, 185, 225, 275, 315 etc. – Wont work for everyone. Theres a huge difference from someone doing that who has a 1RM of 400lbs vs 185lbs, for example. I recommend a percentage based warm up that way the loads you use are appropriate to your strength level. If you have odd numbers on the bar such as 140lbs, 170lbs, 215lbs as you warm up.. who cares?

How I warmed up today for my 6×6 bench press
bar x 10
135 x 5
185 x3
225 x3
245×3
275×1
start first set of 285×6
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Try this, and you should find you have much more energy for your working sets, which in return will allow you to perform more volume and lift more weight than you otherwise would have; which should translate to greater strength gains.
Clackamas, Oregon, Happy valley, Personal training, gym