Warming Up Properly

There’s generally three types of people you’ll find in the gym when it comes to working out: the person who warms up well and gets actually ready to workout, the person who says they “warm up” but just swing their legs around and stretch their hamstrings, and the person who doesn’t warm up at all (usually due to them saying it takes too long, it’s boring, you don’t actually need to, etc.) What you should know is that a good warm up can be one of the most important parts of your workout and doesn’t have to take a super long time. Warming up correctly improves how you perform and reduces your risk of injury. In the rest of this article, I will explain to you how exactly to go about a good warm up in a time efficient manor so that you can reap these benefits.

The RAMP principle

The National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) is the leading body of research and education in the exercise science world. For warming up, they state that you should follow what is called the RAMP principle; which stands for Raise, Activate, Mobilize, and Potentiate. “Raise” is referring to raising your body temperature. This can be done any number of ways, but the simplest would be doing some light cardio for 2-4 minutes, or really until the point where you are breathing a little faster or you feel a little warmer (can be a treadmill, elliptical, jog, jumping jacks, etc.). “Activate” and “Mobilize” are often grouped into the same movements. This really means taking whatever movement you are going to train and performing it with very light weight and through as much of a range of motion as possible. Remember, with these first two parts, you are not trying to kill yourself, just get a little blood flowing and practice the movements. The final part of warming up, “Potentiate,” means approaching the load that you are going to do for your first real set. For example, say you were going to bench press 100 pounds total for your first real set, for your potentiating set you would want to use between 75-80 pounds and you would not want to take this set to failure, really just to the point of slight discomfort.

Now, I’d like to talk to you about how to apply this principal to different types of exercise. The types of warm ups I’d like to break down include those for a general hypertrophy (muscle building) workout, a strength-focused workout, and cardiovascular workouts.

Warming up for a hypertrophy-focused workout

Whether you are doing an entire upper body workout, leg workout, push day, pull day, etc., these principles will apply. For this example, let’s imagine we are warming up for an upper body workout. Let’s say these are the exercises we plan to perform: Lat Pulldowns, Bench press, Dumbbell Rows, Shoulder Press, Triceps Rope Pushdowns, and Dumbbell Curls. Now, applying the RAMP principle may seem rather straight forward here, however it can be tedious to do all of your Activate and Mobilize and Potentiate sets at the beginning of the workout. Instead, I recommend you follow this plan:

Start by doing the Raise component as you normally would. After this, do the Activate and Mobilize and Potentiate sets as you get to that exercise in the workout. Let’s talk about what I mean by that. Assuming we are doing the exercises in the order listed, we are starting with Lat Pulldowns. After you complete the Raise component, perform the rest of the RAMP principle for Lat Pulldowns only and then do your real sets. One you get to the next exercise, the Bench Press, do the last components of the RAMP principle for this exercise and then do your real sets. Then just follow this pattern as you go through the rest of your workout.

Quick tip: to save time, you really do not need to rest very long in between your Activate and Mobilize set and your Potentiate set.

Warming up for a strength-focused workout

When our goal in a workout is primarily to build strength, it can be helpful to modify the RAMP principle a little as opposed to what is done for a hypertrophy focused workout. Generally, when strength is the goal of a workout, that really means getting stronger on a particular lift (squat, deadlift, bench press, shoulder press, etc.). In this type of workout, you will be doing less exercises overall than a hypertrophy workout, more sets of the strength exercise in question, and lower repetition ranges (heavier weight) for the strength exercise in question. Because we are doing heavier weight, you will want to put more emphasis on the Potentiate portion of the ramp principle. For hypertrophy-focused warming up, we only did one potentiating set. However, when you are dipping into the lower repetition ranges, you may want to do a few more.

Let’s take a look at an example. Say you were warming up for a workout where you wanted to build strength on squat; let’s assume you already completed the Raise portion of the protocol and the top set you wanted to perform was 225 pounds for 3-5 repetitions. First, you will want to do one or two sets with just the bar where you squat down as low as you can and pause at the bottom so that you get your body comfortable in a deeper position. Next, you could throw 135 pounds on the bar and do the same thing: one or two sets going as deep as possible, and also making sure you are not pushing yourself yet- just getting comfortable with some weight on your back. Then you can bump it up a little more and follow the same protocol with 185 pounds. After following this, your body will be ready to squat some heavier weight.

Warming up for cardiovascular exercise

This could entail going for a run, bike ride, or whatever the endurance activity is you are doing. Let’s break this down using a run as the example exercise. The same principles will really apply, just applied in a different manner. Again, it has to do with how we approach the Potentiate portion. For the raise portion, I recommend doing a very short, light jog (50 yards) or some jumping jacks to get your body temperature up. Then for the Activate and Mobilize portion, you should do some movements such as deep body weight squats, toe touches for reps, high knees, butt kicks, etc. Again, remember you do not want to really be breaking a sweat too much yet. Potentiating your body can be incorporated into the run itself in this example. Let’s say you plan to run 4 miles (which is a very long run don’t get me wrong, but just for example’s sake). The first mile of this run can be dedicated toward potentiating- where you run at a slower pace. After this first mile, you can pick up the pace a little bit to the speed you want to run at for the rest of the run.

Warming up myth: stretching

One thing you should notice in this article is that I have not once referenced static stretching as a part of a good warm up. By static stretching, I mean holding a stretched position for an extended period of time (i.e. touching your toes for 20 seconds). Truthfully, static stretching before a workout can decrease your power output and increase your risk of injury, and mobilizing yourself by taking light loads through a full range of motion will serve you much more to get looser.

Conclusion

What I hope you take from reading this is a sense of direction of how to warm up and why it is important. Warming up may not be the most glamorous part of exercise, but I would argue that is just as important as your real sets and that it does not have to take a ton of time to do right.