Warming up for Strength Training: a Short Guide
When it comes to warming up, there are two mistakes people commonly make:
not warming up at all
Spending way too much time doing warm up activities
It isn’t breaking news that warming up before you exercise is important.
However, your warm up doesn’t need to take more than 10 minutes to be effective.
So, the aim of this article is to lay out essential components to a good warm up for a strength training workout.
If you have any questions left unanswered, you are welcome to email me at info@fitnesssimplified.org or comment below!
The R.A.M.P. principle
The national strength & conditioning association recommends using the R.A.M.P. principle to guide your workouts.
This acronym stands for:
Raise (body temp.)
Activate
Mobilize
Potentiate
Raise
This is the first component that should make up any warm up procedure.
What we are ‘raising’ is your core body temperature.
This is best done using a light cardio modality, such as a stationary bike.
About 5 minutes of this is usually sufficient.
Activate & mobilize
For our purposes, these can be grouped together.
The aim here is to get a little bit of blood flowing throughout the body and work through the movements to be trained through as full of a range of motion as possible.
If there are any other mobility drills you personally prefer/need to to incorporate, this would be the time to do them.
Potentiate
This refers to getting your muscles ready for your working weight.
Usually, this means slowly increasing the weight of a movement closer to your working weight; while not taking any of these sets close to failure.
Example: warming up for a barbell back squat
To put this into practice, let’s use the following example: a person warming up for the barbell back squat who’s best performance on this exercise is 185 lbs for 6 reps.
A warm up for this individual could go something like this:
3-5 minutes at an easy, conversational pace on a piece of cardio equipment
1 sets with just a barbell squatting as deeply as you can, focusing on the mobility
1 set with 95 lbs for 2 reps
1 set with 135 lbs for 2 reps
1 set with 185 lbs for 1 rep
For most people, a warm up following this structure is going to be more than sufficient.
With that in mind, the following points are worth noting:
If there are other movements you like to incorporate, such as ankle stretches or rotator cuff exercises, they should be done in the ‘activate and mobilize’ portion of the warm up.
These should also be done in addition to the previously mentioned warm up style, never replacing it.
The heavier the weight you seek to use on a lift, the more warm up sets you may need in the ‘potentiate’ section of this warm up structure to be adequately prepared.
I would advise against stretching in your warm up.
Training the movements in the workout with less weight and a full range of motion will “loosen you up” far more effectively. Plus, it may decrease power and strength throughout the workout. [source] This performance decrement likely won’t be very large, but it’s at least enough reason to say it isn’t worth your time.
You don’t need to do the mobilizing and potentiating sets of all your exercises at the beginning of your workout.
Doing so may be practical in a home gym, but not always in a public space. It is perfectly acceptable to follow the previously mentioned squat warm up, perform your working sets of squats, and then warm up your other moves after.
