Warm-ups that earn their place

Three jobs, and nothing else

A warm-up is doing its work if it raises your temperature, moves the joints you are about to load through the range you are about to use, and rehearses the movement itself at increasing weight. That is the whole list.

Everything else in a typical warm-up is either someone else's prescription or filler. If a drill does not serve one of those three, it is costing you session time to no end.

Specific beats general

Ten minutes on a bike raises your temperature and does nothing for the other two. If the first exercise is a squat, the best warm-up for squatting is squatting: the empty bar, then a light set, then something closer, then the working weight.

This is why the warm-up block in a session is short and sits in front of the work it belongs to, rather than being a fixed routine bolted onto every day regardless of what follows.

How many ramp sets

The heavier the top set, the more rungs you need on the way up. A rough shape:

• Light working weights: one or two ramp sets is usually enough.
• Heavy singles and triples: three to five, getting smaller in reps as the weight climbs.
• The ramp sets are not training. Keep the reps low enough that none of them is tiring.
• If the ramp leaves you fatigued, it was a workout and the working sets will show it.

When you are short on time

The warm-up is the first thing people cut and often the wrong first thing. Cutting the ramp sets does not save much time, and it moves your first hard set to a body that has not rehearsed the movement.

If the session has to shrink, shrink the work: fewer sets, or a lighter top end. Tell the app how long you have and it trims from the end, where the least important work lives, rather than from the front.