Starting Strength

pushing hard instead of worrying about how to push. The motor pathway – the neuromuscular adaptation to a complicated movement pattern – must be prepared every time it is used, whether you’re throwing a baseball or doing a squat. The more familiar the movement pattern, the less critical this aspect of warm-up becomes, but for a novice it is always very important. The warm-up sets prepare the motor pathway at the same time that they prepare the tissues for the upcoming heavier work. While you are doing the first sets, you can address and fix form errors so that during your work sets, you can focus more on driving the load and less on maintaining correct form.
    It is foolishness to neglect warm-ups. Many government school programs, in an attempt to implement a strength program without allotting sufficient time to do it, omit most of this crucial part of the workout. The coach in charge of a program that does this commits malpractice . Please heed the following rather strong statement: if your schedule does not allow time for proper warm-up, it does not allow time for training at all . It is better to omit strength training from your program than to suffer the inevitable injuries that will result from lack of warm-up. Yes, warm-ups are that critical.
    Warm-ups will vary with the lift being warmed up. If the room is cold, an initial warm-up on a rower or exercise bike might be useful to raise overall body temperature; if the room is warm, this will probably not be necessary. The squat, by its nature a total-body movement and being the first exercise of the workout, serves quite well as its own warm-up. It should be carefully and thoroughly prepared with a couple of empty-bar sets, and then as many as five sets between those and the work sets. The next upper-body movement will benefit from this preparation and, in the absence of an injury, can be warmed up adequately with only three or four sets. The deadlift will be warm from the squat, provided that the pressing hasn’t taken so long that you have gotten cold. The power clean, being a more complex movement, will require more warm-up for technique purposes. Assistance exercises, if they are done, will be done last with already warm muscles and joints, and will require only one or two warm-up sets.
    Any area that is injured will require additional warming up. If the injured area does not respond to the warm-up sets by starting to feel much better after you do two or three sets with the empty bar, you will have to decide whether to continue with light sets or wait until the area has healed better.
    First, some terminology clarification. A work set is the heaviest weight to be done in a given workout, the sets that actually produce the stress which causes the adaptation. Warm-ups are the lighter sets done before the work sets. “Sets across” refers to multiple work sets done with the same weight. The work sets are the ones that provide the training effect; they are the sets that make strength go up, since they are the heaviest – for novices, the weight you haven’t done before. The warm-up sets serve only to prepare the lifter for the work sets; they should never interfere with the work sets. So plan your warm-up sets with this principle in mind. The last warm-up set should never be so heavy that it interferes with the work sets, but it must be heavy enough to allow you to feel some actual weight before you do the work sets. It might consist of only one or two reps even though the work sets will be five or more reps. For instance, if the work sets are to be 225 x 5 x 3 (three sets of five reps at 225 pounds), then 215 x 5 (five reps at 215) would not be an efficient choice for a last warm-up; a better choice would be 205 x 2, or even 195 x 1, depending on your preference, skill, and experience. Since the focus is on completing all the reps of the work sets, the warm-ups must be chosen to save gas for the heavier sets, while still being heavy enough that the first work set is not a shock.

    Table 8-1. Example distributions of warm-up sets and work sets.

    As an example of the importance of proper warm-up, let’s examine the effects of a bad warm-up carried to the extreme. There is an old workout, known as “The Pyramid,” still floating around weight rooms and gyms all over the world. For the bench press, this workout would go something like 135 x 10, 155 x 8, 175 x 6, 185 x 5, 195 x 4, 205 x 3, 215 x 2, and 225 x 1. By the time you finish the last set, you