How to warm up for exercise

The first question we need to ask is, why should you warm-up? This question is often overlooked because warming up seems self-evident. The two main reason people do and should warm up is to improve performance and to reduce injury risk. However, many things people often do to warm up are simply a waste of time. The goal of this article is to teach you how to warm up most efficiently while spending as little time as possible.

What to avoid when warming up

Let us talk about time wasters. First, we have foam rolling. While foam rolling does seem to increase short-term flexibility, it does not significantly increase strength performance and the increased mobility often isn't worth the time. Mainly since a general warm-up, also increases mobility. The second question is does foam rolling decreases injury risk, this also does not seem to be the case.

The next thing we need to talk about is static stretching. Stretching is an all-time, time waster. You will often hear people talk about how they should stretch more as if it has some magical healing properties. It turns out it doesn't. It turns out the opposite is true. While short bouts of stretching might not harm performance, longer stretches do. How about injury risk and flexibility? While stretching may improve RoM, it does not seem to do so more than exercise and it does not reduce injury risk.

How to efficiently warm up

But how should you warm up for exercise? As we mentioned earlier, the goal of warming up is to reduce the risk of injury and increase readiness to perform. What one should do to gain these benefits is what is referred to as dynamic stretching. This is simply a fancy word for movements. We recommend preparing for an activity at high intensity by doing that movement at low intensity until ready to increase the intensity. What does this look like in practice?

Imagine you want to squat 100 kg for a single rep. First, one starts with just the bar and squats a few sets to get things moving. Then in a few increments, we move closer to the weight we want to do the single at, reducing the reps as we increase the intensity. An example of this can be seen above. This strategy is possible for pretty much any performance event, though sometimes the total load is so low that no warmup is needed at all.