Warm Ups Should Not Be Easy
The ‘Easy Warm-Up’
You’ve just arrived at the gym, and have 50 minutes to lift before your next meeting, or class. You grab a foam roller, and do some bodyweight movements. You start foam rolling each muscle group. Five minutes has gone by. You begin performing light bodyweight movements for the muscles you plan to train, and some stretches. By this time another 5-10 minutes has gone by and now you have 40-35 minutes left to do the meaningful lifts in your workout. You begin warming up on the back squat, and now 5-10 minutes later you’re at your working weight. By this time you have 30-25 minutes to get through your working sets of squats, and accessory movements.
Now, what if there was a way to improve the efficiency of this warm up, maybe even scale it up so you’re doing something more meaningful in the warm ups. This is where progressing these movements is valuable not just to improve the efficiency of your warm ups, but the effectiveness of your workouts overall.
Challenging Loads>Light Loads
Take the cat cow, it’s a great movement to mobilize the thoracic spine, and pelvis. Now assume you already possess the ability perform multiple cat cows, and perform squats with loads heavier than bodyweight. Now this movement, although valuable at one point, is no longer providing a meaningful enough stimulus to elicit the response you may need to effectively warm up. What could be a great replacement for this is a cable crunch, which moves the spine along the same flexion/extension movement as the cat cow.
Demonstration of a Cable Crunch
If you want to focus more on the thoracic spine, pull those ribs down, tuck that pelvis posteriorly and aim to only move the upper back. Maybe you want to mobilize the entire spine, lumbar and thoracic spine included. Then untuck the pelvis, but maintain tension in the abdominals, and allow the spine to flex/extend freely.
Now let’s say when you squat your knees turn too far out because you lack the ability to rotate your femur inwards, indicating you lack internal rotation. A 90/90 hip opener is a great option to use in the beginning, but once you’re strong enough this will no longer be as beneficial. This is where loading up your hips and legs in an internally rotated position will hold more valuable. Implementing a split squat with the front foot elevated, or at ground level holding the load in the hand opposite from your front leg achieves this by forcing your center of mass of the front foot to shift more inwards, forcing your front knee to stay more inwards/neutral as you squat. These movements will yield a much greater return on your investment, in this case the investment being time and effort, than just bodyweight alone.
Demonstration of a Front Foot Elevated Split Squat
Putting it all Together
By performing both of these exercises, we’ve eliminated low stimulus bodyweight movements, for challenging exercises. To improve efficiency even further, you should circuit these movements in between your squat warm ups for 1-3 rounds. An example being if a person is working to a heavy set of 5 on the squat, the warm up could look like cable crunch -> split squat w/ offset load -> squat at 40-60% of 1RM depending on experience, then repeat while adding 10% of your 1RM to the next warm up set. As you get warmed up, maybe you find yourself feeling ready after one round of these movements. Awesome, cut the cable crunches and split squats early and just go to the main squat movement. In the opposite situation, you could find yourself feeling tighter, or more sluggish than usual, keep them in for an extra round that day. Warm ups should not be easy, nor should they take 30+ minutes. Get in the gym, get warmed up, and get to work. Your time is valuable, and so are the results you get.
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