#022 Warm Up Guide

Welcome back to the 22nd edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

Today, we will be discussing a topic you often ask me about in the DMs or during Q&As: How to warm up properly.

Warm up is a topic that is both underrated and over-engineered.

Underrated because you are literally leaving gains on the table due to a poor warm up, while also risking injuries that can significantly impact your muscle growth not only over the short- but also the long-term.

I don’t think I need to explain to you why you should avoid injuries at all costs, but here is a quick reminder. Besides the obvious, that injuries are painful, suck, and might stick with you for the rest of your life (I know a bunch of people that messed up their shoulders when they were 18-21 years old and now have pain during many push exercises), you can’t train when you are injured and will therefore lose muscle mass.

It is over-engineered because some people follow the trend of 15-30-minute warm-up routines. This trend comes from powerlifting, where people tend to have extensive warm-up protocols (partly because it’s useful and partly because it’s their individual ritual to get ready for heavy sets). And while this makes sense in powerlifting, where you move very heavy weight and can easily get severe injuries, this is not exactly the case when you are training mainly for hypertrophy. Sure, a long warm-up won’t hurt you, but we also want to be time-efficient and not spend 30 minutes warming up.

Therefore, the Boats & Logs approach is to warm up as much as necessary (to not get injured) while keeping the time investment as small as possible.

Let’s get into how to warm up properly.

Many believe that they need to start with some cardio in the beginning, which I don’t agree with. Let’s say you are training upper body. How does running or cycling help you there? Some people might argue now that they do it to get their heart rate up, which is fine, but you really don’t need to do it as part of your warm-up.

Approaching it from a Boats & Logs approach, cardio before your workout is a very time-inefficient way to warm up, as it only gets your heart rate up but doesn’t necessarily warm up your joints for the lifting later. Additionally, if you are doing cardio to an extent where you are already (pre)exhausted, this warm-up has a negative impact on your workout. Therefore, I’d argue to do cardio after the workout or on different days and do it for the sake of doing cardio, not for warming up.

Instead, I split my warm-up into two parts: A general warm up of joints and muscles and an exercise-specific warm up.

The general warm-up for the joints depends on which muscles you train that day. Generally, I have a quick routine to warm up my hips on leg days and a routine to warm up my shoulders on upper body days. You don’t necessarily need to do this warm up, as long as you do a proper exercise-specific warm up, but I found that I feel better going into the exercises if I’ve done around 5 minutes of quick routines to warm up my joints.

For legs/hips, I usually do 3 movements of 10-15 reps (for both legs):
1. Swing my leg back and forth (As if I were kicking a ball)
2. Swing my leg from left to right in front of my body
3. Lift one leg in front of my body and have the knee at a 90° angle, and then rotate my hip outwards

For upper body/shoulders, I usually do 5 movements of 10-15 reps (for both shoulders):
1. Circulating my arms in both directions (back and forth)
2. Shoulder rotations (arms extended and parallel to the ground; simply rotate the palm of your hand up and down)
3. Very light weight external shoulder rotations
4. Very light weight lateral raises
5. Very light weight external shoulder rotations

That’s all I do as a first general warm up for my joints. As I said before, it is not necessary, but it only takes me around 5 minutes to do, and I feel a bit more warmed up going into the exercises, so I keep doing it.

Besides being helpful regarding injury prevention, the exercise-specific warm up mainly serves the goal of improving your performance during an exercise.

Imagine you are starting your push day with a heavy set of dumbbell bench press straight after doing a few general warmup movements. Odds are, the weight will feel incredibly heavy, you will only poorly target the actual muscle, and you will perform below your peak performance.

Therefore, we want to avoid these problems by “activating” the muscle and nervous system through an exercise-specific warm up.

We are doing these by performing multiple warm up sets before we are doing our first real working set. The goal is to get used to the movement and the weight without already tiring the muscles because we want to be at our maximum strength when we start the workout.

Therefore, pick a very light weight you can easily do for 10-15 reps without a problem or exhausting yourself for your first warm up set. During this set, be very conscious about the concentric and eccentric phases of the movement and try to really focus on targeting the muscle.

Afterward, we want to get our bodies used to the weight we are doing in our first set. Therefore, gradually increase the weight with each warm up set. How many sets you are doing is up to you, but I would do at least two:
1. 40-60% of target weight for 6-8 reps
2. 80-90% of target weight for 2-4 reps

As for the first warm up set, make sure that you are not tiring the muscle or exhausting yourself. We want to keep the energy for our real sets.

In some cases, especially when you are lifting really heavy weight, it can make sense to do a few more warm up sets and work yourself up a bit slower. But if you are that advanced, you will know quite well how to get warmed up.

Note: This only applies to the first exercise for each muscle group. Afterward, your muscles are ready, and it is usually enough to do only one warm up set with 40-60% of the target weight to get a good feeling for the exercise. Again, if you are training with really high weights, this may not apply, and it can make sense to do more warm up sets.

Lastly, I want to emphasize again that you should always listen to your body. On some days, it may take a bit longer to warm up than on others. Take your time and do what’s necessary to lift safely.

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Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.