Warming Up on a Strength Training Routine
Before doing any exercise, you should definitely do some warm-up sets as to avoid potential injury when dealing with heavy weights. Warming up on a strength training routine is very simple. A lot of people don’t like doing warm-ups so they simply avoid them, which is a terrible thing to do. Spending 5-10 minutes of your time warming up will help prevent future injury that may knock you out of the weight lifting game for months, so why risk it?
Here’s how to proceed when warming up for your first exercise (we’ll take the squat as an example). Let’s say your working set is 175 lbs. This is how you should warm up to it (Sets x Reps x Weight):
- 2 x 5 x Bar
- 1 x 5 x 85 lbs
- 1 x 3 x 125 lbs
- 1 x 2 x 155 lbs
The whole idea of warming up is to get the blood flowing through your muscles and help stretch them a bit. Do not warm up till you exhaust yourself, that’s not the point and would simply tire you out when you reach your working sets. Remember, you want to have enough energy to complete your heavy working sets, so don’t kill yourself on the warm-ups. Also, do not rest between warm-up sets as it is unnecessary.