Greg Nuckols of Stronger by Science once said, “If you need your warm-up routine to be more than 20 minutes, you need to be in physical therapy, not in the gym.” I’m paraphrasing, but people tend to get carried away with this whole warming up thing, especially if you’re healthy and injury-free.
I’m speaking specifically to powerlifters and people who love lifting heavy in the squat, bench press and deadlift. And if you can’t do those three movements without foam rolling, smashing, flossing and stretching every muscle from head to toe, maybe you shouldn’t be doing those exact exercises. But that’s a topic for another day.
This article is directed toward the injury-free lifter with adequate movement quality to perform the big barbell lifts. Time is precious, and I encourage you to streamline your warm-up routine so you can get under the bar, train hard and move on with your life. I once was guilty of endless warm ups that took longer than a Red Sox-Yankees playoff game, but recently I’ve started using a warm-up approach that gets the job done in much less time.
Warming Up vs. Corrective Exercise
Somewhere along the line, we got fooled into thinking warm-up routines needed to be a series of 14 “corrective” exercises to fix our muscle imbalances and repent for our sins. But what if I told you that you might not need any correcting?
Remember, if you’re injury free and have adequate range of motion in the joints that need to move to squat, bench press and deadlift, the purpose of your warm up is simply that: to warm up, to feel physically and mentally ready to train.
Note the word “feel.” If your mind believes that you’re ready to train, you probably are. But if you were told by a trainer that you “move like shit” or you read an article that said you need exactly 45 degrees of rotation here and 180 degrees of flexion there before you are somehow “worthy” of performing your favorite exercise, you may suddenly “feel” not warmed up unless you perform a mini yoga session before every lift.
And what if I also told you that corrective exercises don’t really correct anything? I often talk to our Strength House interns about the “strength of a stimulus” when it comes to warm-ups. What’s going to have a more lasting impression on your body: a couple reps of a rinky-dink mobility drill or a heavy set of squats? Let’s say that you have lower back pain every time you squat, and in order to squat pain free, you foam roll and do a bunch of mobility drills before squatting, only to then squat heavy with terrible technique. Those heavy squats are going to erase everything your warm-up accomplished in the blink of an eye. Your warm-up is a bandaid and you keep scratching at the scab with your poor technique.
A better approach would be to spend less time on mobility drills and more time squatting with less weight and perhaps a different type of squat that allows you do so with perfect technique and no pain. Your body is more likely to adapt to even a lightly-loaded goblet squat than an unloaded corrective exercise.
Now that I’ve got that rant out of my system, let’s talk about how I’ve been designing warm-ups for my healthy lifters.
The Warm-Up Recipe
I like to design my warm-ups around a set of core principles rather than specific exercises. As long as the exercise accomplishes the specific task, you can use whatever movement you want. And rather than using a dozen different exercises, I prefer to select just a couple of drills that actually work and perform them in circuit fashion. This allows you to perform them quickly, which increases your core temperature and heart rate, and gets you under the bar sooner. Quality over quantity.
Here’s a skeleton warm-up routine:
| Lower Body Warm-Up | Upper Body Warm-Up | Full Body Warm-Up |
| Breathing Exercise (Hip/Pelvis focus) x 5 breaths | Breathing Exercise (Shoulder/Thorax Focus) x 5 breaths | Breathing Exercise (Hip/Pelvis focus) x 5 breaths |
| Breathing Exercise (Shoulder/Thorax Focus) x 5 breaths | Breathing Exercise (Shoulder/Thorax Focus) x 5 breaths | Breathing Exercise (Shoulder/Thorax Focus) x 5 breaths |
| 2-3 rounds | 2-3 rounds | 2-3 rounds |
| Core exercise | Shoulder mobility exercise (pressing focus) | Core exercise |
| Hip mobility exercise | Shoulder mobility exercise (pulling focus) | Full body, large amplitude mobility |
| 2-3 rounds | 2-3 rounds | 2-3 rounds |
| Light Squat or Deadlift (focus on technique and full range of motion) | Light Pressing movement (focus on technique and full range of motion) | Light Squat or Deadlift (focus on technique and full range of motion) |
| Full body, large amplitude mobility | Full body, large amplitude mobility | Light Pressing movement (focus on technique and full range of motion) |
By limiting myself to only 6 warm-up exercises, I’m forced to pick movements that are actually a good use of our time. The focused breathing drills at the beginning accomplish what foam rolling wishes it could do (reduce muscular tightness and increase joint range of motion) but in much less time. Low-level core exercises create positional awareness (I might tell a lifter, “Feel this front plank? This is what your abs should feel like when you squat.”) AND make any ensuing mobility drill more effective. If your ribcage and pelvis aren’t properly aligned, your hip and shoulder mobility exercises won’t do much. Finally, some sort of light squat, press or deadlift that takes the lifter through a full range of motion is highly specific to what we’re about to do under the bar.
Steal These Warm-Ups
Here are 3 sample warm-up routines using the above outline. I’ve written them for a squat, bench press and full body (bench press and deadlift) workout, respectively.
This format lets lifters go from walking into the gym to under the bar in less than 10 minutes. You can swap in any exercise that fits the category and gets the job done.
Remember, this approach works for healthy, injury-free lifters who have adequate movement quality to do the big lifts. If you’re injured or need extensive foam rolling and mobility drills just to get under the bar, go see a physical therapist or other health professional for guidance. But otherwise, try this warm-up approach to make better use of your pre-lifting routine.