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Short Summary
Main recommendation: Warm up with about five to seven minutes of dynamic, whole-body movement first, then keep warming up the first exercise until you can move perfectly and feel ready, and treat the length of any further warm-up as individual rather than fixed. Warm-ups for later exercises are generally unnecessary once the same joints and muscles are already warm, unless you are learning a new or technically demanding movement.
Key Points
- The ideal warm-up length varies by person: some people need a minimal warm-up, while others (such as a Major League Baseball pitcher described by Dr. Andy Galpin) perform better after a very extensive one.
- Warm-up needs depend on training goal: hypertrophy is driven mainly by volume, so an overly long warm-up that causes fatigue can hurt results, while strength and power are driven by intensity, so warm-up sets should continue until you are moving at near-full power.
- The first exercise of the day usually needs the most individualized warm-up because it is typically multi-joint and skill-dependent.
- Later exercises usually don't need a full re-warm-up, unless the movement is new, technically difficult, or dissimilar from what you just did.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: General warm-up: do about 5 to 7 minutes of dynamic movement (for example, high knees, butt kickers, and movement through multiple planes and joint ranges of motion). Use about 10 minutes if you are a slow starter or feel achy. Dynamic movement is preferred over static stretching, and cycling for five minutes is not preferred by the speakers.
- Concrete instructions: For lower-body work, make sure the ankles are moving correctly first, since hips and knees follow. For upper-body work, get the shoulder blades and neck moving, since elbows follow.
- Concrete instructions: For the first exercise, warm up until you can move perfectly in that movement. For hypertrophy, you can start the first working set slightly suboptimal to preserve volume. For strength and power, don't start working sets until you are at about 100% of your ability (the speaker notes that velocity-based training communities often count reps as working sets once they exceed about 70% of one-rep max, or once a set velocity is reached).
- Concrete instructions: For later exercises, drop the load a little and practice reps if you are learning a movement, or do specific activation warm-ups if you switch to a complex movement with weaker mechanics. Otherwise, no re-warm-up is needed once the same muscles and joints are warm.
- Dr. Galpin's vertical jump example: a pitcher was tested by jumping until he had three consecutive jumps or fell below 90% of his peak, to find when performance drops, and then conditioning was based on that point.
- Dr. Galpin noted that the speakers' examples are individual, and the test results varied: Dr. Galpin's pitcher client peaked around rep 69 or 70 during the vertical jump test, continued jumping to around rep 130 without being told to stop, and performs best with a very extensive warm-up before games.
Bottom Line
Start with a short whole-body dynamic warm-up, dial in your first exercise until it moves well, and set the amount of extra warm-up by your goal and how your body responds rather than by a fixed rule.
