Warm Ups Should Not Be Easy
The ‘Easy Warm-Up’
You’ve just arrived at the gym with 50 minutes to lift before your next meeting, or class. You spend 5 minutes on a foam roller, and another 5-10 on light bodywegiht movements and stretches, leaving only 35-40 minutes for your workout. After an additional 5-10 minutes of warm-up sets on the squat, you’re at your working weight with just 30-25 minutes left for your working sets and accessory movements. What if there was a way to improve the efficiency of your warm up, and make it more meaningful? Progressing these movements is key, 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 spine, but if you already possess the ability to squat with heavy loads, this movement may no longer provide as an effective stimulus as it were before. A better replacement could be a flexion row, where in the bottom portion of the movement, you round the upper back intentioanlly, and at the top of the movement you straighten out the upper back.
When squatting if your knees turn too far out due to a lack of femral internal rotation, the 90/90 hip opener is a great option, but will eventually lose its benefit. Instead load your hips and legs in an internally rotated position. Implementing a split squat with the front foot elevated, while holding an offset load achieves this. The offset load forces 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 challenging, loaded movements yield a much greater return on your time and effort than bodyweight exercises alone.
Front Foot Elevated Split Squat
Putting it all Together
By performing these exercises, we’ve eliminated low stimulus bodyweight movements, for challenging exercises. To maximize efficiency, circuit these movements for 1-3 rounds between your squat warm up sets. For example if you’re working to a heavy set of 5 on the squat, your warm up can be flexion row → split squat w/ offset load → squat at 40-60% of 1RM. Repeat 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 warm up short and go to the main squat movement. In the opposite situation, you could find yourself feeling tighter, or more sluggish than usual, do the full 3 rounds for a warm up 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.
Ready to stop wasting time in the gym, and get real progress from every minute you spend in the gym? Reach out via email/text today to set up training.
