What Makes a Good Warm Up?

Have you been to the gym, knowing you need to warm up, but not exactly sure what you should be doing? So you do a couple arm circles, pull each arm across your chest for a few seconds (literally everyone’s go to stretch before picking up something heavy, for some reason), and jump on the bench press saying “good enough”.

Or worse, you didn’t warm up at all and may have even suffered an injury because of this. In either case, I think we can all agree a good warm up is important before engaging in higher intensity levels of physical activity. But what exactly makes up a good warm up? Is there one routine you can do every time you hit the gym or go for a hike, run, or ride?

The phrase warm up means exactly that: we warm the body up. In my personal opinion, the gold standard warm up is one that raises the body temperature to levels that more closely mirror those during your activity, and consists of movements that look similar to those that will be conducted during your activity. That’s it. As long as you follow those rules, your warm up is most likely better than 90% of those around you, as sad as that sounds.

So what about those gym bros with their fancy bands and foam rollers where they do the same banded shoulder rotations to “warm up” their rotator cuff, or blaze 50 passes over their IT band with a foam roller before they do some squats?

Let’s look at each of these examples individually:

We’ve all seen that person who ties a band to a rack or other machine and rotates their shoulder in and out 100 times before saying “time to bench press!” Does this follow the rules of our gold standard warm up? Did they increase the core temperature of their body at all? Most likely not. Simple single joint movements typically don’t get a good sweat going, regardless of the number of repetitions you do. Does this movement closely mirror or look like the main movement of the day, which we said was a bench press? Absolutely not. The bench press is a compound joint movement, meaning we are moving multiple joints of the body at once, and tapping into several different stability sub-systems. 

A better choice for this person might be some bodyweight push-ups or a push up from the knees or a wall. If performed for some higher rep ranges, we will most likely increase our core temperature, AND a push up closely resembles the bench press. Both rules check!

Now what about our foam rolling squatter? Did you know that there is actually really good research to show that the act of “foam rolling” or rolling a lacrosse ball over tissues does not do anything to improve soft tissue quality or warm up the tissue for activity? Does this mean that foam rollers and lacrosse balls have no business or right being included in our warm up? Not necessarily! It all depends how we use the foam roller or lacrosse ball. These can actually be paired up with specific kinds of movement to become very powerful mobility and warm up tools! Without getting into too much detail on the rights and wrongs, click here to see an example of what I’m talking about.

Let’s go back to our original question: Is there one warm up you can do to appropriately warm up the whole body for just about every activity? Not necessarily, but if I had to point you towards one warm up, I would use Joe DeFranco’s Limber 11. A link to that can be found by clicking here.

Any questions on your warm up, feel free to send us a message! We would be happy to help you out and point you in the right direction.

Yours in health,

Team LeverEdge