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106: Warming Up vs. Cooling Down: What Actually Matters
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In this episode of the Movement Logic Podcast, Laurel unpacks what warm ups actually do—and why cool downs aren’t necessary. She explains how warming up sharpens focus, raises tissue temperature, and primes the nervous system, setting you up to perform better and reduce injury risk. Laurel shares five simple principles for effective warm ups, clears up myths about stretching and “activation,” and contrasts them with cool downs, which don’t aid recovery or prevent soreness.
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References:
Article - (Stronger by Science) Heavier warm-ups are best, new study suggests
Paper - Systematic Review with Meta Analysis on Cool Downs (Afonso, 2021)
Ep. 90 - Capacities for Longevity: Strength
Ep. 39 - RPE, 1 RM, 3 sets of 10, oh my?
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Podcast Mission
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm Laurel Biebersdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:15
Speaker
or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt? Whatever that means, we're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices.
00:00:32
Speaker
Let's dive in.
Episode Topic: Warmups and Bone Density Course
00:00:45
Speaker
Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm your host, Laurel Beersdorf. I'm here by myself today talking to you about warmups. Before we get into it, we are gearing up to launch Bone Density Course Lift for Longevity, slated to start on November 6th, that six months of guided, coached strength training and impact training training.
00:01:09
Speaker
We do teach you how to work with barbells. You will gain proficiency in barbells. You will gain proficiency in how to strength train that will take you beyond using just barbells. You'll be able to apply the principles of strength training to any type of equipment you want to use.
00:01:28
Speaker
It is a coached course in a number of ways, live classes on Zoom where you're getting real-time feedback, but also asynchronous feedback in the Facebook group via form check videos. There's also community support in the Facebook group.
00:01:43
Speaker
And it's six full months, which is enough time to really learn the exercises, to really learn how to strength train, to really make actually profound changes to your strength.
00:01:57
Speaker
You will come into the course at whatever level you are, absolute beginner, maybe you're coming from a pretty sedentary place, maybe you're coming from a pretty active place, maybe you've been working with lifting weights for a while, maybe you haven't, maybe you've never touched a weight, maybe you haven't even dared look at one By the time you leave our course six months later, I guarantee you, you will be much, much stronger.
00:02:23
Speaker
And so much so that I don't even know if you can imagine how much stronger. You get to keep everything in the portal, which is over 30 hours of content. By the time it's said and done, forever, you keep it forever. So if you are interested in the course and you want to save $100 on enrollment and you want to get some cool free stuff,
00:02:42
Speaker
actual course content so you can sample the course, then you should go to the show notes and get on our interest list. You're just going to give us your name and your email address and you'll be added to our mailing list. So you will receive our regular emails, but you'll also receive these specialized emails that give you free stuff from the course. And this is the list you need to be on to get the discount.
00:03:02
Speaker
So if you are already on our mailing list, you need to be on the interest list You need to be on it. And even if you never sign up for the course, the interest list has a lot of perks.
00:03:15
Speaker
So get into the show notes, folks. Get on the interest list. You can always unsubscribe at any time if you're like, nah, never mind. I don't want to learn about strength training. I don't want a demo video about how to do this excellent upper body Exercise. Nope.
00:03:32
Speaker
Don't want a calculator to help me always know the exact right load to use for different rep targets. I don't want that. I'm unsubscribing. You can do that literally anytime you want.
00:03:46
Speaker
All right. And then also go ahead and give us a rating, a review. If you haven't subscribed yet, subscribe. We have a season of absolute baller material coming your way.
00:03:58
Speaker
for season seven. This is, it could be, our best season yet. We are riffing, ranting, unpacking a lot of information circling around these days around how women should exercise, specifically women in the peri to post-menopausal era of their lives.
00:04:22
Speaker
We are unpacking a lot of grift and a lot of actual evidence-based advice. So this is Sarah and my favorite thing to do, right?
00:04:33
Speaker
Which is to debunk the bullshit and in the process, hand you a lot of valuable information too. So season seven is gonna start rolling out
Benefits of Warmups: Performance and Injury Prevention
00:04:42
Speaker
and you wanna make sure you're subscribed for that, right? So hit subscribe.
00:04:47
Speaker
Okie dokie, here's a question. How many times in your life have you thought, I just don't have enough time to work out today? For a lot of people, the barrier to working out isn't only about how they've arranged their priorities,
00:05:02
Speaker
ah how they are approaching the workout itself, but it can also be about something we don't talk about or you maybe even think about as much as we should, which is what we do before the workout, aka the warm-up.
00:05:16
Speaker
I think sometimes we assume maybe that a proper warm-up means that we have to do lots of stretching, joint circles or CARS, controlled articular rotations to make sure that we are prepared for moving or we maybe think we need to break a sweat before we can start our workout.
00:05:35
Speaker
And we use the warm up to check all these boxes, make sure we've touched every part of our body in some way. And then maybe on top of all of that, we think we also need a cool down. I'm gonna jump in right there and say, spoiler, we do not need a cool down, but we'll touch on that briefly soon. Anyway, the result of all of this is that exercise and everything that comes before it can start to feel like it's just gonna take way too much time and we don't have that time.
00:06:02
Speaker
So we skip it entirely. Now, in case you're wondering, yes, warming up before exercising, specifically when exercise reaches higher intensities,
00:06:13
Speaker
ah Good warmup lets you perform that workout at a higher level within the workout. We'd call that performance enhancing. And a warmup can support better performance in the workout. The thing about performing better in the workout is that then that workout will send a stronger training signal to your body.
00:06:34
Speaker
And that stronger signal will then drive your body to adapt further and potentially get even fitter. So basically a good warmup can actually set the stage for a more productive training session, which is pretty cool.
00:06:50
Speaker
Additionally, the second reason you might want to warm up is that Warm-ups may lower your risk of injury during exercise. They're one of the best ways, first of all, to switch into workout mode mentally and just get focused so you don't commit stupid errors, but also a way to prepare your body to receive the forces of the workout more gradually, and then also to practice the movements before you do them full out.
00:07:20
Speaker
But I think what happens is that for various reasons, we might overcomplicate warmups and maybe even spend too much time on them. such that instead of being this efficient bridge from whatever you were doing before your workout, they end up actually stealing too much time or even too much energy from the workout.
00:07:42
Speaker
And then that means less... time and energy left over for the workout. so what we're going to do today we're going to try to uncomplicate warm-ups by homing in on what a warm-up should include and aim to do in order to fu fulfill its purpose.
00:07:59
Speaker
And then in contrast, maybe we'll talk about what we could probably skip or simplify or rethink. So the warm-up is more efficient and sets us up better for better training.
00:08:09
Speaker
So in this episode, I'm gonna share five practical ways to rethink your warmup to make it more concise, targeted, and effective. Here are the five takeaways at a glance, and then we'll spend a little bit of time going into each one.
00:08:22
Speaker
Number one, a warmup should actually get your body feeling warmer. That should be the primary goal. We'll talk more about that. Number two, I think a good heuristic is to keep it under 10 minutes, and we'll talk about why.
00:08:37
Speaker
Number three, at least some part of your warmup, maybe not the whole thing, but some part of your warmup should look very closely like your workout, just probably at a lower intensity.
00:08:48
Speaker
Number four, when you finish your warmup, you should feel like you've entered a state of readiness rather than a state of fatigue. And number five, you might appreciate your warm-up more if you start to capitalize on the fact that you do it regularly and see the time you spend warming up as potentially time you could get additional practice, gain additional skill, even gain additional capacities.
00:09:19
Speaker
So start seeing your warm-up as bonus material in route to preparing you for the main course of the movement you're going to do. Let's go back. Why warm up at all?
00:09:33
Speaker
So the purpose of warm up, as I said, is twofold. First, we're enhancing performance within the workout. Second, we're helping to reduce injury. Here's how it you might enhance performance in a warm-up. I think it happens in three key ways. You sharpen your mental focus, which is a big deal because we come from our lives where we might have been distracted.
00:09:52
Speaker
And unfocused training is a pretty reliable way to tank your performance. like You know, when you start a heavy set of squats, for example, you're still thinking about your work emails and your form falls apart, right?
00:10:07
Speaker
You make an error under the bar because you're not really present with the squat. A warm-up, whether general or specific, can help pull your attention onto the task at hand, into your body so that you're mentally present for the workout.
00:10:19
Speaker
Number two, warm-ups enhance performance by making you warmer. As your muscles contract, they generate heat. It makes your tissues more pliable, less stiff. It raises your core temperature slightly.
00:10:32
Speaker
This systemic rise speeds up nerve conduction. It might even ramp up enzyme activity for energy production. So that's going to result in better performance. You really do want to feel warmer.
00:10:45
Speaker
And then the third way that warmups can enhance performance is that they prime your nervous system in a couple of ways. One is a way called post activation performance enhancement, PAPE. The physiology is complex.
00:10:57
Speaker
It's also not well understood necessarily in the research, but likely involves increased motor unit recruitment. So more of the muscle is firing. We might increase firing rates. So the signal that the muscle gets from the brain happens more rapidly. So we can make movements more forcefully.
00:11:14
Speaker
And we might also have complex chemical changes taking place inside the muscle that make it contract more efficiently. This is especially true for when we are warming up for more explosive movements or movements where we have to work against heavier resistance.
00:11:29
Speaker
Rehearsals designed to approximate those demands or even go beyond those demands, doing a movement with higher force or higher speed than we'll actually need to use for the movements itself, this can create a brief temporary boost in output for the working sets.
00:11:49
Speaker
So that's one reason why warmups might prime your nervous system. Another is that every time you do a movement pattern, you are just practicing the movement pattern.
00:12:00
Speaker
So there's a motor learning aspect to this. You're rehearsing the movement only maybe from a lower intensity. So the pattern of movement, it's ready for you to call on kinesthetically when those stakes are higher. It's also gonna just contribute to a process of mastery over time, right? The more you practice something, the better you get at it. And this practice is happening in the warmup in addition to the workout.
00:12:26
Speaker
And in fact, when loads are lighter in the warmup, we have maybe a little bit more time to consider sir technique to consider tempo, to consider form, right? In the aggregate, warm-ups can contribute long-term to greater skill.
00:12:43
Speaker
Okay, on the injury side, the value of warm-ups is a little harder to prove because injury is really tough to study because of the confounding variables that impact how injuries occur and the flip side, how we prevent them.
00:12:59
Speaker
But there are some real practical benefits that are simple. So as mentioned, warm-ups improve mental focus. This simply makes you commit fewer careless errors that you would otherwise make if you were still distracted.
00:13:12
Speaker
you're less likely to rush your setup in the squat. You're more likely to notice that your equipment is not correctly arranged, it's not working properly. You might have more focus on stuff like where your feet are placed while running. I'm thinking of trail running, for example. It's pretty treacherous on the trails out here by my house, and I'm much less likely to fall if I'm really paying attention to where I'm putting my feet.
00:13:37
Speaker
And it's much more logical for me to come into that mental focus with a slower trail run than to immediately start going as fast as I possibly can on the trail from the jump.
00:13:50
Speaker
right So slowing down and beginning with a lower stakes movement can give your mind time to catch up with the activity you're currently engaged in and get on board focus-wise.
00:14:01
Speaker
Warm-ups also double always as a opportunity to check in during those lower stakes movement and ask yourself, how am I doing today?
00:14:12
Speaker
How does my body feel? How am I feeling? How is my mental focus? How are my energy levels? This is what's called auto-regulation, right? So how can you self-regulate?
00:14:23
Speaker
How can you tune in to how you're feeling? Really listen to your body to know how much do I think I can handle today? And then you can more properly dose stress accordingly. So maybe you're doing your warmups for the bench press and you notice a tweaky feeling in your shoulder, or maybe you start your cardio session. And this happens to me very frequently on runs.
00:14:48
Speaker
And i noticed that, wow, yesterday's session really left my legs feeling flat today. Based on that that I'm able to observe while jogging slowly, i can recalibrate my expectations for this workout and perhaps even completely ditch the workout I had planned in favor of something a little bit more low intensity and appropriate for my current state of recovery and fatigue, right? So this check-in is valuable feedback that you want to have before you begin those higher stakes movement where you now added intensity and the stakes have gone up.
00:15:24
Speaker
And I think that this is especially important for after you are returning to working out from being either injured or sick. So this is where you want to be perhaps a little bit more keyed into how your healing has come along from your injury, how that part of your body now feels in response to training, but also after you've been sick for a while. Like,
00:15:49
Speaker
Maybe you are on the upswing, but you don't feel 100%, right? After a cold or a flu or whatever you had. So you're going to use the warm-up as a check-in. And you might also have had to take several weeks off because of injury or sickness. And so then the warm-up also becomes a way for you to check in with your current level of fitness because it may have actually gone down. Maybe it's gone down a lot because you've been away for a long time.
00:16:14
Speaker
So warm-ups are a check-in, and in that way, they can help you to decrease injury risk by simply helping you calibrate your expectations and the manner in which you proceed with the workout itself.
00:16:25
Speaker
And then finally, I think this is something we don't often think about, but warmups, again, in the aggregate, this time you spend warming up, this is in essence just more movement. It's it's more training.
00:16:35
Speaker
It's more physical activity. By warming up, you're contributing to your overall training volume, albeit at a lower intensity. In the long run, warmups can contribute to your increased capacities of strength, endurance,
00:16:50
Speaker
mobility, flexibility, balance, it's going to move the needle a little bit, maybe not as much as your workout, but it's going to move ah the needle a little bit to your overall
Cool Downs vs. Rest and Recovery Methods
00:16:58
Speaker
fitness and resilience. And that in and of itself could be protective against injury.
00:17:02
Speaker
So warmups are valuable as performance enhancers and as potential reducers of injury risk. So I do think it's more valuable to do them than it is to skip them, especially for high intensity workouts.
00:17:15
Speaker
And I think this becomes clear when we compare the value of warm ups to cool downs, for example. OK, so in contrast, there is no good evidence or even biological plausibility for the necessity for cool downs.
00:17:31
Speaker
But old school advice says they're essential, right? You got to cool down so that you aren't so sore tomorrow or you've got to cool down because then you'll recover quicker. But there is no evidence that shows this is true.
00:17:42
Speaker
Cool downs don't reduce soreness. They don't speed up recovery and they don't prevent injury. Cool downs can actually prolong fatigue. And this makes sense if you just think purely about the energy that you need to exercise.
00:17:55
Speaker
I think A helpful analogy is think of your energy like a bag of sand, right? When you begin to warm up, you poke a small hole in the bag and the sand, your energy, starts to trickle out. And then as you begin to work out, that hole opens up more, right? You're using more energy, higher intensity. The sand spills out more quickly.
00:18:16
Speaker
And by the end of your workout, the bag is nearly empty. You're fatigued, you're depleted, you're ready to stop. A cool down after the workout doesn't refill your bag, which is what you need to do to be able to train again, right? What it does is it just leaks out more sand.
00:18:32
Speaker
And unless it's a pretty sedentary cool down, like meditating or self massage of some kind, it's going to deplete your bag somewhat more. So to truly refill your bag of energy to be able to train again, your best bet is rest, right?
00:18:50
Speaker
And hydration and nutrition, of course, as well. Now, if you enjoy cooling down, do it. Maybe you just feel better, less keyed up and calmer if you do some stretching or some lower intensity movement like yoga,
00:19:06
Speaker
Absolutely do it, but know why you're doing it because you like to and it makes you feel better, not because you necessarily need to. ah In other words, it's not going to help you recover faster and it's not going to reduce muscle soreness.
00:19:24
Speaker
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00:19:40
Speaker
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00:19:53
Speaker
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00:20:12
Speaker
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00:20:29
Speaker
Okay, let's unpack each of the five takeaways now in a little bit more depth.
Effective Warmup Strategies
00:20:34
Speaker
Let's start with warming up to feel warm. It's right there in the name, warm up. So what are we doing in a warm up when this doesn't happen, when we don't actually feel warm at the end?
00:20:44
Speaker
Well, maybe you spent the entire warm up or maybe just too much of it, doing things that don't raise your body temperature. Things like passive activities, passive static stretching, joint circumductions, foam rolling, maybe it's just walking, but maybe slow walking. These can feel nice, but since they don't demand much muscle engagement, they probably won't create enough muscle work to raise your body's temperature.
00:21:12
Speaker
Now, before we go on, a quick note on stretching. There are a few stretching myths out there. There are a great many of them, actually. But here's one. Many people believe that it's necessary to do static passive stretching before working out because it reduces injury risk.
00:21:26
Speaker
I think it's important to state why people might believe that static passive stretching before working out is important. The reason you might be spending a lot of time on it is because you believe that it will reduce your injury.
00:21:38
Speaker
This is just simply not supported by evidence. Stretching alone it does not reduce injury risk. But it's, I think, freeing to know that that's not true. And so if you like static passive stretching, you can continue to do it for part of your warmup, but you definitely don't need to do it at all if you don't want to. Now, I think it's also necessary to state that if you like static passive stretching and you want to do it in your warmup, you absolutely should because the pendulum has swung, believe it or not, all the way over in the other direction where, based on a few cherry-picked studies, misapplied
00:22:11
Speaker
to populations they weren't meant to be applied to, the story quickly swung hard in the other direction and became passive stretching in the warmup increases your likelihood of injury while training or passive static stretching will decrease your performance during training. And here's the thing about that.
00:22:27
Speaker
Unless you're doing extremely long end range holds of stretches, you're fine. And even if you are doing long end range holds of stretches, the effect of deeper, longer held stretching it is small and short lived. And so if you just put a little bit of time between the stretches and your workout, you'll be fine.
00:22:44
Speaker
Most people are not doing long held, very deep stretches before they work out. They're maybe stretching their hamstrings for 30 seconds on each side and because that's what feels good. That's totally fine.
00:22:55
Speaker
Continue to do that. This is a personal preference thing. It's fine to include it. If it's becoming your whole warm up, you might want to rethink how much of it you're doing so you can make space for other more active movement that will actually warm you up.
00:23:09
Speaker
All right, let's do the next takeaway, which is keep your warm up under 10 minutes. This is very specific, and I'm always skeptical of very specific advice like this. So I just want to give you the caveat. This is not set in stone. Obviously, I'm sure you could make many decent cases for a longer than 10-minute warmup when you take into account the activity you're warming up for.
00:23:30
Speaker
For example, Olympic weightlifters, I think, probably spend quite a bit more time warming up for like a heavy squat snatch than 10 minutes. um But you can also potentially make a great case for longer warmups depending on personal preference and goals. But if we're just using the warmup to enhance workout performance and reduce injury, there's probably in most cases no reason that it actually needs to be longer than 10 minutes.
00:23:55
Speaker
And in many cases, it could probably be much shorter. So I think a good rule of thumb is if 10 minutes go by in your warmup and you haven't even started any aspect of your workout yet, it might be time to edit it down, especially if time is one of your main barriers to exercising.
00:24:15
Speaker
I think the best warm-ups are often under 10 minutes. They build gradually in intensity from lower to moderate to even bursts of high intensity. And they often blend seamlessly almost right into the workout.
00:24:27
Speaker
So for me, if I'm warming up for a faster bout of running, I'll usually give myself between... one half to one mile to warm up.
00:24:38
Speaker
And that will start as a very slow jog, maybe even a fast walk into a slow trot. And then gradually it will begin to pick up speed.
00:24:50
Speaker
And this will really be in response to how the running feels. Do my legs start to feel like they have more pep? Do my joints feel like they can handle a little bit more force. It's by feel.
00:25:03
Speaker
But I start slow and gradually I'm running at speed. For bone density course students, we begin every workout in the live classes with a general warm up. We do a combination of joint circles, a little bit of movement that looks like yoga, and then we shift into the specific warm up, which is replicating the movement patterns of some of the main lifts, maybe even adding plate or even the bar as external load.
00:25:33
Speaker
They might start doing lower intensity versions of the impact training sets that they're going to be doing. And we'll start to move into the warmup set buildup to the main compound lift. So if they're working into a rep target of four to six reps of the back squat, they'll start doing their warmup sets.
00:25:54
Speaker
gradually adding plates, maybe it's two to three warm-up sets before that first working set. And in between the warm-up sets, right, which is still part of the warm-up technically, they will have already started their working sets of the impact training.
00:26:08
Speaker
So they'll do a warm-up set, maybe empty bar of the back squat, and then they'll do a set of pogos. And then they'll do their second warmup set of the back squat with a little bit more load on the bar. And then they'll do another set of plyos. Maybe this time it's broad jumps.
00:26:24
Speaker
Then they'll do another warmup set. And by the time they're done warming up for whatever the first exercise is, they're also done with their impact training. So this is what I mean by the warmup blending into the workout itself. You can be warming up for something while full on working out something else.
00:26:44
Speaker
For me, I will start to warm up some compound lift. In between those warm-up sets, I might actually go do a working set of an exercise. Like, I often do my working sets of calf raises. Working sets means I'm doing the full amount of load that I'm going to use to work out my calves.
00:27:03
Speaker
I will do my calf raises. raise sets in between warm-up sets of the squat. And the calf raises, my toes are up on an elevated surface and I'm dropping my heels down low, getting a big stretch ah while I load my Achilles and calves.
00:27:18
Speaker
that's improving potentially my dorsiflexion for the squat, right? So the calf raises double as both a way to strengthen my calves and strengthen my Achilles tendon, but also to warm up my ankles for squatting.
00:27:28
Speaker
I might also use my warmup sets for the compound lift as a way to superset some upper body exercise. that doesn't require as much of an on-ramp to warm up for.
00:27:40
Speaker
I'll often do my pull downs in between warm-up sets for the squat. But if no part of your workout has even begun, you're still in prep mode after 10 or 15 minutes, and one of your biggest barriers to exercise is time, or maybe you start feeling a little fatigued by the time you're done doing all the warm-ups that you're doing, it might be the case that your warm-up is less like a bridge, right?
00:28:04
Speaker
It might be instead becoming an obstacle, a transition that has too much main character energy, right? A series of lower stakes movements that have also lower fitness value.
00:28:16
Speaker
They're stealing time from the higher stakes, higher value movement they're meant to prepare you for. So it might be time to do some editing, all right? Point three, if you have a goal for exercising that is even slightly specific,
00:28:30
Speaker
then you'll be interested <unk> to know that to achieve those specific results you're looking for, you'll probably have to train in some specific
Specificity and Intensity in Warmups
00:28:37
Speaker
way. It won't be anything goes. Specificity matters. We get out, fitness-wise, what we put in.
00:28:44
Speaker
in terms of our exercise modality selection. but So your warmup is gonna follow these rules. If your goal for the warmup is to enhance your performance and reduce injury, then it should look more, not less, like what you're doing in training.
00:29:00
Speaker
It should look similar. It should just start out at a lower intensity. And specific warmups fulfill all the main goals of a warmup.
00:29:11
Speaker
They sharpen attention, they increase blood flow to the target muscles that you'll use in training, they create potentiation and motor recall of the task or movement pattern that you'll perform,
00:29:23
Speaker
So for strength training, that means warm-up sets, OK? So the deadlift. Your warm-up sets should be lighter versions of the deadlift. You might do multiple warm-up sets that gradually increase in weight.
00:29:34
Speaker
So you're not only warming up the movement pattern, but you're also warming up the force production that you will need for those heavier deadlifts, right? Additionally, technique will need to adjust as the load gets heavier. So you're continuing to practice your technique under truer to real life conditions in which it's going to matter the most. So the warmup set maybe starts at 50% of your working load, then jumps to 70, 80% of your working load. You might even do you know one final warm-up set of a couple of reps that's like 90% of what your working load will be.
00:30:10
Speaker
Across these warm-up sets, you're paying attention to your form, your breathing, how it feels, but you're also paying attention to not fatiguing yourself too much, right? So you don't want to enter a state of fatigue with the warm-up set. Each warm-up set, you want to enter a stage of readiness. And I would also say confidence. You want the warm-up sets to boost your confidence to achieve the amount of weight and the rep target in the working sets. And maybe you might decide based on how the warm-up sets feel, like you actually have to adjust down your weight for your working sets. Or maybe you're feeling especially good today.
00:30:47
Speaker
I'm going to adjust it up five pounds. So warm-up sets are not necessary for every single lift and strength training, though. They're really mostly especially necessary for heavy lifts. So a heavy lift is where the rep target, the number of reps you're aiming to do is less than six to eight reps.
00:31:02
Speaker
And typically also, when we're talking about heavy lifts, we're usually talking about a select number of exercises that are called compound exercises. So these are squats, deadlifts, bench presses, pull-ups even, overhead presses.
00:31:15
Speaker
We're not talking about isolation exercises or accessory lifts like bicep curls or calf raises or knee extensions, hamstring curls, tricep extensions. You don't need to warm up for those necessarily unless you feel like you do.
00:31:28
Speaker
First of all, the movement is simpler, right? It's isolated. Second of all, the rep target for those exercises tends to be more moderate or light. Rep targets in the 8 to 20 rep range. And Because of that, because they demand less muscle mass, they're probably going to happen later in a well-programmed workout. So your compound exercises that you did earlier when you're more energy rich, right? Think of the bag of sand being fuller at the beginning of the workout, kind of like our bank account, right? We want to be energy rich for the most expensive exercises.
00:32:00
Speaker
So you're going to do those compound exercises probably earlier on. And then toward the end, when you get to what are predominantly the more moderate to lighter, maybe more isolation-based exercises, you're already warmed up.
00:32:12
Speaker
Now, I'll give a caveat to that. It's not to say that you wouldn't do a few preparatory reps of an isolation exercise ever. In fact, I often do for certain exercises where I notice that it's very frequently the case that, say, if I'm doing like a single arm pull-down,
00:32:31
Speaker
on the cable machine or if I'm doing the adductor machine. I'll often notice that if I don't do a couple of preparatory reps of these exercises, that my second set will be a better performance than my first set.
00:32:44
Speaker
What does this mean? It means like, OK, I've decided I'm going to put however much weight on the cable. And I do my first set and I realize, oh, I did eight reps. And then I rest and I come back to it. and then I do my second set and I do like 13 or 14 reps.
00:32:58
Speaker
Like, wow, why why why would was I able to do 14 reps my second set? And I only did eight reps my first set. you know If we go back to the sand in the bag analogy, you know, technically I should have been able to do more reps on my first set because I was freshest, right?
00:33:13
Speaker
Typically, we have the most to gain from strength in the first set because that's when we can output the most. We're the most energy rich. That's when the training stimulus is going to be highest. It's going to make the biggest change, right?
00:33:25
Speaker
And then it's a Matter of kind of diminishing returns for each additional set we do, right, which will contribute but not as much to our strength fitness. But sometimes it's the case that the second set you actually did more reps and you're like, well, wait a second, what happened there? Well, it's probably the case that the first set was acting a bit like a warm up, right? Now you could decide, all right, so I want to get the most out of every single set. So I'm going to do just a brief warm up set before this first moderate set. You could do that.
00:33:50
Speaker
Or you can not worry about it because in the grand scheme, right, when we zoom out, which is really the perspective that we want to take with exercise, we want to take a bigger picture perspective, not get too caught up in the weeds.
00:34:03
Speaker
When you zoom out, is it going to make that big of a difference to your strength long term that in a couple of exercises, your first set ends up kind of being a warm up and then you really are able to go full out in your second set?
00:34:15
Speaker
I guess you maybe want to care about that if you're a strength athlete, if you have some type of competitive goal. But if you're really just trying to get stronger continuously over time, I don't think you need to really become too concerned when that happens.
00:34:29
Speaker
But just an interesting thing you might observe when you train. Does your second set have higher reps, the same amount of load, than your first set? It might be the case that your first set potentiated your second set. In other words, what you might want to do is add a warm-up set that potentiates your first set.
00:34:44
Speaker
That way, your first, second, and third set can all be performed at the highest possible level. But it's a great example of how warm-ups can actually enhance performance of the workout. Okay, back to heavy lifts or heavier lifts.
00:34:56
Speaker
It looks like heavier warm-up sets, if we're doing warm-up sets, are probably the most important for performance enhancement. But also it looks like it's a bigger bonus if you can do both a lower intensity as well as a higher intensity warm-up set before a truly heavy lift. So a couple of studies looked at this one.
00:35:17
Speaker
by Ribeiro at Al found that a warmup set of eight reps at 64%
00:35:24
Speaker
led to better performance than a warm-up at only 32% of a 1RM during subsequent heavy lifts. Even better performance was seen when participants did both.
00:35:35
Speaker
One lighter warm-up set at 32% of a 1RM, followed by a heavier set at 64% of a 1RM. By the way, if you get on our interest list, you'll learn about percentages of 1RM. You'll get a 1RM calculator that we built for our website.
00:35:50
Speaker
and you'll be able to understand a little bit more about what this is about. Additionally, I'll link some past episodes in the show notes that talk about percent of 1RM and what that means. Another study by Sousa et al saw that when participants performed a second warm-up set with 90% of a OK, so if your 1RM is if your one r m is to lift 100 pounds one time and one time only, then this warm-up set was with 90 pounds. Okay, so very close to maximum.
00:36:17
Speaker
They performed better in their working sets, three sets of squats to failure at 75% of a 1RM, which I find this fascinating. When these people did warm-up set at 90% of their 1RM, they were able to perform more reps at 75% of a 1RM than they were able to when the warm-up set was only 45%.
00:36:38
Speaker
forty five percent of the 1RM. So that potentiating effect is really quite commonly observed in exercise. And it adds a little nuance to this idea that the warmup needs to be happening at a lower intensity always than the actual workout.
00:36:56
Speaker
So both of these ideas support the idea that heavier warmup sets closer to working intensity, even beyond working intensity, can prime your nervous system in the muscles more effectively than lighter ones.
00:37:07
Speaker
a phenomenon often described as the post-activation performance enhancement effect, as i as I mentioned. I encountered these studies, by the way, in a Stronger by Science article titled, Heavier Warm-ups Are Best, New Study Suggests, which I will link for you in the show notes. so So to summarize, if you're warming up for heavy sets of an exercise, make sure that you have at least one heavier warm-up set that gets close to your working load.
00:37:29
Speaker
Better yet, ramp up to that with one or two sets that build gradually in load. Now, another way to think about gradually increasing intensity for the warmup is intent effort. Intent of effort just means how hard you're trying, whether you're moving with half effort, three quarters effort, or going all out.
00:37:47
Speaker
So for running, this is really simple. Say you've got sprints programmed for your workout. To warm up, you start with a low intent effort, a jog. Then progress to a slightly higher intent effort, a run. ah Maybe progressing to an even higher intent of effort to what people in the running world call strides or surges, which are few seconds bursts or accelerations toward top end speed, you know, for 15, 20, 30 seconds before you bring it back down.
00:38:15
Speaker
I like to think of this as like my mom was a singer. She would warm up her voice for singing at church by gradually progressing. her scales to higher and higher notes, right? So toggling intent of effort gradually upward is something we do in bone density course for the impact training exercises where we're internally selecting effort for our impact. So we'll start our pogo hops, for example, at a three out of 10 effort.
00:38:39
Speaker
And then we'll continue warming ourselves up for that impact by progressing to a five out of 10 effort. And then some folks that are working a little bit, maybe higher intensity can tolerate that impact. Well, they'll work up to higher, like eight, nine, 10 out of 10.
00:38:53
Speaker
efforts in their POGOs. So this is a great way to specifically warm up for impact training based on feel, based on intent of effort that is gradual and specific. This also translates well to getting ready to play a ball sport, right, which I know many of you listening probably do every once in a while. Many of my personal training clients play some type of sport. And so let's say that they want to warm up for these sports. I think that this is very instinctual, but it has to do with intent of effort. So for golf, right, you wouldn't go 10 out of 10 drive from the tees is the first thing you do when you get to the course, right? You might do a few putts, then a few chips onto the green.
00:39:29
Speaker
You might hit with your wedge a few times, then bring out you know your smaller driver, start to hit a few mid-range hits, and then maybe bring out your big you know you're your' big kahuna driver and smash a few, right? Same with disc golf, right? You don't start by throwing the disc as far as possible as your first movement, hopefully, right? You start with some mid-range throws, maybe some putts.
00:39:49
Speaker
Pickleball, you start batting the ball back and forth and sort of half-ass the cutting and the reaching and the diving, gradually working into stronger commitments to the ball as your body warms up. Same with tennis.
00:40:00
Speaker
Basketball, you ignore your opponent. You're just kind of focusing on your own shots, undefended. Some close range shots, some free throws, some three pointers, maybe moving into jump shots and layups.
00:40:14
Speaker
You get warmed up before you begin pressuring the other person or being pressured during those shots before you're cutting and chasing and ramming into your opponent, right? Specific warmups can be gradual, and they can be as gradual as they need to be.
00:40:31
Speaker
They should probably start at a lower intensity than the target and build from there, and they should be based on your readiness to increase. Now let's contrast this specific warmup strategy with a more general warmup,
00:40:43
Speaker
which doesn't look anything potentially like the exercise you're preparing for, and that's totally fine. Maybe the general warmup is joint circles before strength or running. In bone density course, we'll usually start with joint circles, at least in the class I teach.
00:40:57
Speaker
Sarah might start a different way. um will often then progress into yoga-based type movements. Maybe you want to do some light cardio on the treadmill before you do your strength training. Yes, even stretching and foam rolling.
00:41:10
Speaker
These more general warm-up strategies, they definitely deserve a spot in your warm-up if for any reason at all you just feel drawn to them. Sometimes they are the treat you give yourself that helps wet your appetite for the actual workout.
00:41:23
Speaker
For example, I really like the way certain passive stretches feel in my body and i will do them as my general warm up because they are a great way for me to mentally shift away from my screen or my computer where I've probably been sitting before my workout and into my body.
00:41:39
Speaker
I also sometimes like to do a little jogging, a little light cardio because it's a very expedient way to actually feel warm. on days where I start out strength training feeling quite cold.
00:41:52
Speaker
General warmups, these types of movements are typically the lowest stake movement. And sometimes ways to mentally transition and even physically transition that feel like an easier way in, right? To shake off the desk chair, to slough off the couch and to forget your to-do list and get into your body.
00:42:11
Speaker
The key is that you don't spend all of your time on them, especially if some of your workout will involve higher intensity efforts. So if you're using both, if you're doing both a general and specific warmup, maybe set aside five minutes for the general warmup and then five minutes for the specific warmup, or maybe just start with a specific warmup and you can get that specific warmup done sometimes in less than five minutes, depending again,
00:42:35
Speaker
on what the exercises you're using to train, what your experience level is, and your, you know, overall physical state, um and your preference, right? All right, point four.
00:42:46
Speaker
A warm-up should prime you for performance, but it can't do that if it leaves you feeling depleted. So an example of this happening could be too many warm-up sets leading up to a compound heavy lift.
00:42:57
Speaker
um Maybe it's too many reps in each warm-up set. Maybe the loads are too heavy for too long before you put your working load on the bar.
00:43:09
Speaker
For a ah cardio session, maybe the lead-in, the warm-up is a little too long such that now you're fatigued, and unable to hit those higher speeds. Or, and this happened to me a lot as a yoga teacher, in sequencing a yoga class, say you have a peak pose or just a harder part of the class that you're building toward, have you sequenced in a way that's left students actually pretty exhausted before they've even gotten to the big backbend or the big inversion or the big arm balance that you're teaching? Many of those yoga poses actually require a warm up for sure. In fact, being warm is probably even more important for movements that require a lot of flexibility.
00:43:50
Speaker
So we want heat to help make us feel less stiff, right? But this could backfire if your warm up it goes on for too long. So I made a lot of sequencing mistakes as a yoga teacher where I had planned this whole class that would go for, you know, an hour and 15 minutes and the peak pose, I would often put too far to the end of that time, right? So the peak pose would happen around, you know, the 60 minute mark.
00:44:12
Speaker
And then the idea was like, okay, we do the peak pose and then we spend the rest of the time cooling down, right? Just doing those more passive static stretches, those more relaxing movements in preparation for Shavasana. But by the time we got there, students were exhausted. Their upper bodies were tired from all the chaturangas or the planks or the other arm balances, or their back muscles were tired from all the other backbending we were doing, or you know And you can see how even though we think of yoga as so much more than exercise, it's still exercise too, right? And so we might want to consider how can our sequence prepare students, put them in a state of readiness for these more challenging poses, right? So if I could go back and redo some of those classes, I think I would put the hardest work at like maybe minute 15.
00:45:02
Speaker
Or ah if we need to be even a little bit warmer than that, maybe minute 30, minute 40, right, not minute 60, and then have even more time on the back end for other stuff.
00:45:14
Speaker
OK, so to wrap it up, you're when your warm up ends, you want to feel ready. Not wrecked. OK. Point five, see your warm up as additional training. See it as an opportunity to work on stuff that you care about.
00:45:33
Speaker
And I think this is one of the least considered bonuses of a warm up, which is that it's time you're using, yes, to enhance your performance and reduce your injury risk in the workout.
00:45:43
Speaker
But it's also time that could double as additional practice. right Your warm up counts as time spent moving. It contributes to your overall physical activity and it is exercise, just typically at a lower intensity.
Warmups as Training and Skill Practice
00:45:56
Speaker
It certainly contributes in the aggregate, especially meaningfully to your fitness and capacity. So use it for this purpose strategically, depending on your goal. For example, say you like a brisk walk or slow jog as a general warmup before strength training.
00:46:10
Speaker
Well, that's great because in addition to that warming you up and raising your core temperature, it's also more steps, right? It's also possibly more moderate intensity cardio minutes.
00:46:21
Speaker
If you strength train three times a week and you warm up on the treadmill for five minutes before each of those sessions, that's 15 bonus minutes of moderate intensity cardio maybe or just 15 minutes of extra steps each week.
00:46:34
Speaker
That's not nothing. And over the months, that amount of extra movement becomes meaningful. Warm-ups are also a great place for skill practice. So let's say you want to get better at jumping rope for whatever reason. You just wish you were better at it.
00:46:48
Speaker
Well, jumping rope is a skill. And ah for many, it requires a good amount of practice. Well, practicing jumping rope doubles as a warm-up for a lot of different plyometric exercises in sports.
00:46:59
Speaker
It could even be a warm-up for running. You can hone your jump roping skills while also warming up either specifically or generally for whatever it is you're about to train. Additionally, you can do stuff like balance training. A lot of balance training actually is quite active, right? So this is a great way to either generally or specifically warm up your lower body for your workouts.
00:47:23
Speaker
while also working on balance. You might be a yoga practitioner and have you know couple poses that they themselves don't require a ton of warming up. I'm thinking like maybe half moon pose. some For some people, they don't really need much of a warm up for handstand. These are challenging poses.
00:47:39
Speaker
Well, these are also really active poses that load your body in ranges of motion that might be valuable to prepare for strength training. And so maybe you do a little yoga practice as part of your general warm up.
00:47:51
Speaker
me kick up into handstand a couple of times. let me Let me practice half moon pose a couple of times. That additional practice is going to meaningfully contribute to your skill in those poses while also doubling as a great general or specific way to warm yourself up for exercise.
00:48:08
Speaker
Specific warmups are very obviously additional skill, strength, mobility practice, right? So every rep of a lighter squat or a lighter bench press or a deadlift, lower intent of effort power, plyometric exercises, they're still providing some stress to your body that will probably in the aggregate result in some change. Certainly, they're contributing to your skill.
00:48:30
Speaker
Same thing can be said about slower cardio. This is going to contribute to your overall cardio respiratory fitness. Warm-ups are not just a means to an end. They can be an end in and of themselves too. Over time, your warm-up can indirectly end up improving skills, capacities, even though its main purpose was in service of the coming workout.
00:48:52
Speaker
The workout itself is what drives all of those adaptations I just mentioned much more meaningfully. So on one hand, don't underestimate the warm-up as a place to sneak in bonus practice and bonus capacity building. But on the other hand, also don't let it stretch on so long that it steals your time from the much higher value work that you will probably be exposing your body to in the workout itself that will probably much more meaningfully move the needle on your fitness goals.
00:49:22
Speaker
All right, folks, I really thought this was going to be a shorter episode. That's hilarious. um It's about as long as they are always. But anyway, here are the five ways to rethink your warm-up if you're not sure your warm-up is doing what it should be doing, you're maybe not warming up, or if your warm-up is taking so much time and time is this barrier to you exercising.
00:49:43
Speaker
Here are the five takeaways. Use your warm-up to first and foremost get warm. Number two, try to keep it under 10 minutes. Number three, make some part of it look like your workout, but just maybe at a lower intensity.
00:50:00
Speaker
Finish your warmup feeling ready, not tired. And to give your warmup more meaning and also make it more your own to personalize it, see it as opportunity to participate in bonus learning and training and to work on stuff that you want to give some extra work to.
00:50:20
Speaker
Warm-ups matter. They definitely don't need to be complicated. They don't need to be long or exhausting. When done right, I think they're short, they're targeted, and they get you ready to perform. And circling back to where we started, time, right? If you've ever felt like working out takes too much time, if you follow these five tips, you can keep it short, simple, and effective and spend your energy where it matters most, which is on the workout itself.
Conclusion and Advice for Skipping Warmups
00:50:44
Speaker
Another thing I want to say before we close is that for those of you who don't warm up, I know you're listening. I know you're like, oh shit. i don't even warm up at all What I'll say about that is you probably do warm up. You just don't think of it as warming up. And number two, not all workouts really need a warm up.
00:50:57
Speaker
Like you don't have to warm up for every workout, especially workouts that are happening at a lower intensity, right? And if you're not warming up and recognizing that I really should be warming up, follow these tips and see if you can build in just like a two or three minute super targeted specific warmup.
00:51:19
Speaker
where you are literally just doing what you will do in the workout, either with less weight or at a lower intent effort, and see how it feels. If you feel like you don't even have two or three minutes, just one minute. See how it feels.
00:51:33
Speaker
See if it carries over to you feeling readier and more successful in the workout itself. I suspect it will. ah Thank you very much for joining me yet again on another episode of the Movement Logic Podcast. We are super excited to bring Season 7 to you starting next week.
00:51:55
Speaker
Please make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. All right, we will see you next week.