The BEST Warm-up for Barbell Training (Plus an EASY Math Trick to Help!)
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How can you warm-up in a simple and efficient manner? It’s not a particularly thrilling topic, but it’s important, and if you’ve been using a percentage chart or an app to help you warm-up, well, you want to stop that right now.
Warm-up charts and apps can indeed be useful when you’re new to lifting, but they’re the diapers of the lifting world - really useful to have in the beginning, but in the long run, life is a lot simpler, cleaner, and better if you outgrow them. Let’s cover the basic criteria of how to structure a warm-up (and there are a number of videos included that go more in depth), and at the end, we’ll go over a math shortcut that’s awfully handy.
#1: Your Warm-up Should Prepare You
There are three warm-up criteria, and the first is that your warm-up should prepare you for your work sets. To do this, the warm-up sets get heavier in roughly even jumps.
#2: Your Warm-up Should Not Exhaust You
Your warm-up needs to get you ready for the work sets, but you don’t want to waste any unnecessary energy during the warm-up, so you will taper the number of reps in your warm-up sets. A rep scheme like 5-3-2-1 works quite well, and although at the beginning of your strength training career, you might not need that many sets, that type of scheme gets the main idea across quite well.
#3: Your Warm-up Should Be Convenient
In other words, the weights you choose for each set should be relatively convenient and easy to load on the barbell. This is where percentage charts and apps really miss the boat - since they don’t take this factor into account, you’ll get a number like - for example - 90 lb for one of your warm-up weights. Don’t do 90 lb - instead, simply use 95 lb since loading a 25 lb-plate on each side of the bar is much simpler than loading two 10-lb plates and one 5-lb plate on each side.
Also, if you’re using a chart or an app to warm-up, every time your work weight changes, all of your warm-up weights then change too (since they are calculated as a percentage of the new work weight). If you construct your own warm-ups, however, you’ll find that you usually only need to change one or two warm-up sets from session to session.
Warm-ups Are Not Precise . . . Mostly.
As you get stronger, more and more of your warm-ups will stay roughly the same from session to session (as mentioned above), and more of your warm-up weights will be built around the bigger plates such as 25-lb and 45-lb plates. On the other end of things, you’ll find that you don’t need to use 2.5-lb plates for your warm-up as warm-ups don’t need to be terribly precise. You might find that you don’t even use 5-lb plates for most of your warm-ups, and you certainly don’t use 1.25-lb plates for your warm-ups.
The 90% Approach
However, as the warm-up progresses to your last warm-up set, it might be time to be a bit more precise, and with that in mind, performing 90% of your work weight for one rep as your last warm-up set is a very reasonable approach (not the only approach, but a pretty solid one). With this in mind, let’s take a look at a sample squat warm-up using 285 lb as the work weight, and we’ll cover an easy way to calculate 90% of 285 as well (Put the calculator down. Now.).
Sample Warm-up with Work Weight of 285 lb
Starting with the empty bar, our lifter performs two sets of 5 reps and then moves on to 135 lb for his next warm-up set (i.e., he adds a 45-lb plate to each side), so we have the following:
45 x 5 x 2
135 x 5
At this point, he adds a 25-lb plate to each side to reach 185 lb and performs a set of 3 reps:
45 x 5 x 2
135 x 5
185 x 3
After this, jumping to 225 lb (i.e., two 45-lb plates on each side) is a reasonable jump for someone who squats 285 lb, so he does this and performs a set of 2 reps, giving us the following thus far:
45 x 5 x 2
135 x 5
185 x 3
225 x 2
If you ignore the empty bar sets, you’ll note that we’re using the 5-3-2-1 scheme covered earlier in this article. The question now becomes, “Can he go from 225 lb directly to 285 lb, or should he do one more warm-up set?” He might be able to make that jump without any trouble, but it’s a rather big jump (bigger than the previous two jumps, which is usually a bad sign), and putting in one last single at about 90% of his work weight is probably a wise move.
The catch is this: Don’t actually calculate 90%.
Math Shortcut
Of course, you are indeed going to figure out 90% of the work weight, but you’re going to do it - mentally - in a roundabout manner, and by doing so, you’ll have done it faster than you would have if you went over and grabbed your phone, calculator, abacus, etc.
Here’s how to find 90% of a number: Subtract 10% of the number instead. As you may or may not remember from your grade school days, finding 10% is easy as it just involves moving a decimal point . Breaking this down, we see the following steps:
10% of 285 is 28.5
28.5 is a silly number. Round that to 30 (remember, warm-ups don’t need to be that precise).
285 - 30 = 255
Thus, our lifter will squat 255 lb for one rep for his last warm-up set, which means his entire warm-up is as follows:
45 x 5 x 2
135 x 5
185 x 3
225 x 2
255 x 1
At this point, he’s all warmed up, and a huge bonus is that his next squat workout of 290 lb can use the exact same warm-up, with the exception being that he might choose to do 260 lb instead of 255 lb for his last warm-up single.
With a little bit of practice, this method of constructing your warm-up will be quicker, easier, and require less thinking than that old chart or that silly app.
As always, we hope this helps you get stronger and live better.
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