i've changed my mind on warmups

You’ve seen me dial everything in over the past few years.

I’ve been a detective learning about what drives growth and how we can manipulate these drivers to get the best growth possible.

My recommendations build on each other. It’s a huge pyramid with layers above layers. I focus on the most important stuff before moving onto the next layer.

As we’re going up the pyramid things have less importance.

Some of the sections end up adding nuance to other parts of the pyramid, this is natural.

• It’s why I went from saying you have to go to failure, to it might be better to be a bit shy. Read here

• It’s why I went from saying you have to bulk, to it’s better to stay at maintenance. Read here

• It’s why I’m now saying that there’s a better way to do a warmup than I’ve recommended in the past 🙄

My old advice was great if you’re just focusing on having fun and don’t care too much about making things perfect

Let’s make this better.

There’s two types of warmups, 2019 Fletcher was actually very close to the Fletcher of today, he just didn’t think any deeper.

Here’s what he said, “Warmups with weight aren’t for the muscle/joints, it’s just to practice the motor pattern”.

I’m not sure why he didn’t question back then if the motor pattern for the first time working a joint was going to be effective for the other exercises, but that’s okay.

What made me start digging a little bit more into this was my cable preacher sets.

• I used a very stable exercise

• I pushed to failure

• My muscle/joint were already warmed up from other movements

• I’d always get more reps on my second set...

After learning more about how motor patterns work I found out that although this coordination is stored, very accessible, and is a huge part of your strength, it’s not instantly turned on.

I hope you understand computers, I’ll be using it as an analogy.

Computers have deep storage called an HDD.

When you’re improving a motor pattern and learning how to be efficient with it (even if it’s a super stable exercise) it’s being saved in your HDD.

The problem with an HDD is that it’s slow and clunky, that’s why your computer has something called RAM.

RAM is where everything your computer needs to remember RIGHT NOW is kept.

Any tabs/games running doing calculations are here.

This is because RAM is super fast, super easy to access, and as efficient as you can get.

Hopefully you’ve deduced the connection already.

In order to best make use of the motor patterns you’ve saved in your HDD, you need to drag them out into your RAM.

This is what the first type of warmup sets do, they’re to load the motor pattern into your ram.

So for every exercise:

• Pick 60-65% of your working weight and do 10 reps (same form/tempo you’d use in your set)

• Rest 90s

• Pick 70-75% of your working weight and do 6 reps (same blah and blah you’d blah in your blah)

• Rest 2-3m

This structure means you head into your working sets with minimal fatigue from the warmup, but with a fully loaded motor patterns.

There’s also a secret secondary benefit… 😳

When you do these warmup sets you can use it to gauge your strength level on that day.

If for whatever reason you’re stronger than usual, you can increase your working weight before ever having to do the actual set and find out too late…

DIVIDERRRR 🤯

Let’s talk about the second type of warmup, the only real one I used to speak about.

The warmup I’ve just told you about has the word “warmup” mean “to prepare”, this is completely fine and not wrong in any way, but this “warmup” is more literal.

“Warm” + “up” 😳

This type of warmup is to literally warm stuff up.

TL;DR when your muscle fibre is warmed up it can use more motors, experience more mechanical tension (growth signal), and also have a lower injury risk.

What’s not to love!

Joints also do not love to be cold…

So this is what the second type of warmup is.

Before a workout we’ll take ~25 minutes to make sure we’re in a good place to workout.

1. Try and do 15-20 minutes of low intensity Zone 1 (50-60% max HR) cardio

   1. If it’s winter DO NOT SKIP THIS AT ALL.

   2. It’s completely fine if you count part of this time from you cycling/walking to the gym but get the full 15-20 minutes.

2. Do some dynamic stretches to mobilise/warm the joint and muscle

Again, that’s literally it.

If I had to call one of these warmups “more important” it would be the second one that focuses on making sure everything is warm and mobile (especially if it’s winter).

Saying that, if it’s summer I’d probably make you prioritise the first type of warmup, it doesn’t take long to get ready if it’s summer.

Of course with all of these types of warmups, if you feel like it’s not needed on a certain day, or if you feel like you need to give it a bit more time, you’re the boss.

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher

P.S. If you use strong use the built in auto-rest timer in order to stop having to start and stop timers over and over. I’d recommend setting up a separate time for sets marked as warmups and working HOWEVER have your second warmup set marked as a working set so you get the 2-3m rest timer you use on working sets, and then mark it as a working set.