The Beginner’s Guide to Strength Training (Part 8 of 30): The Warmup

We’ve covered the basics on assessments and movement-based exercises in the past few articles of this strength training guide. But before we touch any weights or machines, we need to prepare ourselves for the demands of a workout. Lifting weights and pushing our body adds a lot of stress on our muscles and joints if we aren’t ready.

A great warmup helps us perform our best. In this article, I’ll teach you how to dominate your workout — in less than 10 minutes.

If you don’t have time to warmup, you don’t have time to train.

What Does a “Good” Warmup Do?

Many people warmup by walking into the gym, stretching a few body parts, and doing some form of cardio for a few minutes. (Or vice versa.)

While that does raise your body temperature and get you sweating, it’s not an effective way to warmup because it misses so much.

The warmup is a perfect chance to not only make your muscles more limber, but to address any needs and issues your body has. They could be postural problems, movement dysfunctions, mobility restrictions, etc — whatever the case, fixing those issues before a workout will boost your performance during it.

Use this checklist to design a “good” warmup:

• Increase your mobility and range-of-motion (ROM)

  Certain joints are made for mobility (moving freely in different planes) while others are made for stability. Common joints that need to be mobile include your:

  • Ankles
  • Hips
  • Shoulders
  • Thoracic spine (mid-back)

  When these regions get tight and restricted, it creates compensations, unsafe stress on the body, and bad movement patterns (ex. lower-back rounding on a deadlift). Pain and injury can also occur.

  If you improve your mobility, you’ll move, lift, and feel better.

• Raise your body temperature

  Warming a muscle reduces injuries. (Thus the term, “warm up.”) This improves the length and power output of muscles, the ROM in joints, and the elasticity and safety of tendons and ligaments.

  Don’t go to the gym and walk directly to your first exercise — prime your body beforehand and crush your workout.

• Correct your movement patterns

  If you have movement dysfunctions (1’s or asymmetries on the Functional Movement Screen), use the warmup to do drills and FMS corrections. Because you warmup before every workout, you’ll do these more often and fix your patterns faster.

• Lengthen your overactive muscles / Activate your dormant muscles

  Muscles can “fall asleep” through inactivity or poor movement patterns. It’s important to re-fire those muscles to improve movement and strength and reduce injuries.

  Common dormant muscles include:

  • Glutes
  • Shoulder stabilizers
  • Core

  A nearby tight muscle, however, could prevent dormant muscles from activating. In this situation, we’ll utilize “reciprocal inhibition.”

  At your joints, there’s a kind of “tug of war” with several muscles pulling in different ways. When one gets tight, the other must lengthen to maintain balance; when one becomes underactive, the other must become overactive. In the hips, for example, tight hip flexors lead to weak glutes and vice versa.

  With reciprocal inhibition, we “inhibit the agonist and activate the antagoist” — stretch what’s short and strengthen what’s long. In the example of our hips, we’ll stretch the hip flexors first, and then activate the glutes.

  You’ll get a better effect on the weak muscle when you lengthen the overactive muscle first.

• Make yourself better

  I believe if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.

  This 30-part series is NOT for people who want to “maintain.” If you’re reading this, it means you want to improve your workouts and climb to the next level. (If not, this site isn’t for you.)

  But you can’t do that with warmups that don’t accomplish anything. Like your workouts, they should have a goal and make you better and healthier each time.

Putting It All Together

• Start with soft-tissue work

  Use foam rollers, PVC pipes, sticks, and tennis balls to improve the quality of your muscles and fascia. Soft-tissue work removes scar tissue, adhesions (where muscles and fasica stick together), and trigger points, which restores joint mobility and muscle length. Also – where muscles get dense, fibrotic, and tight – soft-tissue work rehydrates and relaxes the muscles and fascia.

  It also increases your body temperature, reduces soreness, and prevents injures. (We’ll stop here before I write another 30-part series on the intricacies of foam rolling.)

• Lengthen and activate AND improve mobility/movement patterns

  Once you restore your soft-tissue health, the muscles are more susceptible to stretching and activation — now is the time to target the areas that are chronically tight. For example, lengthen the hip flexors and activate the glutes or stretch the pecs and isolate your shoulder girdle.

  My faves include:

  • Hip flexor stretch with rectus femoris
  • Cook hip lift
  • Side lying clamshells
  • Side lying diagonal reach
  • Quadruped T-spine extension
  • Board ankle mobility
  • Scapular pushups
  • Forward wall slides

  Also, use mobility exercises to improve joint ROM such as thoracic spine stretches, hip capsule stretches, ankle mobility exercises, etc.

• Also, add movement corrections

  If you have a poor score on the FMS, you have two options:

  1. Choose the workout-specific movement corrections. For example, if you’re going to squat, choose Deep Squat corrections. Or, if you have a workout with a lateral emphasis, prioritize drills in the lateral plane.
  2. Attack the weakest link. If you have 2’s on everything except your shoulder mobility, attack your shoulders every time. (Note: this is the preferred way according to the FMS.)

  Try these exercises:

  • Toe-touch progression
  • Active leg raises
  • Rolls
  • Squat to stands
• Dynamic exercises

  Ideally, you want to start sweating before your workout — dynamic mobility exercises do just that. For these drills, you’ll move, improve mobility, and raise your heart rate.

  Good drills include:

  • Inchworms
  • Walking lunge with twist
  • Walking spidermans
  • Walking lateral squat with cross-behind
  • Walking leg cradles

Quick, Sample Warmup

1. Soft-tissue work
2. Hip flexor stretch
3. Glute bridge
4. Reach, roll, and lift
5. Squat to stand
6. Walking heel-to-butts
7. Lateral mini-band walks
8. Walking spidermans
9. Power skips

This is just one example, but just doing this will increase mobility, activate weak muscles, and warm your body. Give it a shot!

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In the next article, I’ll explain how to put everything together and build your own strength training program. By now, you have a good idea of your goals, the exercises and movement patterns you should include, and how to prepare the body for a workout. But what exercise should come first? Where do you put ploymetrics? And how can we save time and do more work? Stay tuned, and I’ll teach you how to structure your workouts to get the maximum benefit.

Throughout this seres, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of questions, so be sure to ask using the comment section of this post. Feel free to reach out to me via Facebook and Twitter to get your question answered. See you soon!