The Most Effective Warm-up For Boosting Your Performance
Performing a simple warm-up routine is the key to restoring mobility, removing out pain and dysfunction, and making pain-free progress in the gym.
If you think it’s too simple to be true, think again.
If you want to train and perform at a high level to stay healthy, pack on muscle, lose body fat and improve performance, your warm-up is absolutely pivotal to your training success.
The problem is “warm-up” is massively misunderstood.
Some people don’t warm up at all - their warm-ups are the first set of their first exercise. While others spend 20 minutes on a foam roller and corrective exercises, believing it’s the key to getting prepared and staying health
If you need to warm up for more than 20 minutes, you’re not warming up - you're injured.
The average person doesn’t have that much time. They’ll be lucky enough to carve an hour out of their day to workout. The goal of the warm-up should be to get to training in the most efficient and effective manner possible, especially if you’re beaten up.
You need a better warm-up, not a longer warm-up.
Stop wasting away your precious training time on unproductive warms-ups. There’s a right way to optimally prepare to train that will streamline your results while helping you bulletproof your body.
To effectively get to training, you’ll need to prepare the body for performance, clean up weak and painful links, dominant movement patterns and reduce the risk of training injuries.
You’ll never waste another warm-up again utilizing this simple, efficient, and downright effective system.
Time to start treating your body like a finely-tuned machine and walk into every workout feeling and functioning your best! This warm-up involves 6 phases, but you can absolutely knock it out in 6 minutes or less.
Phase 1: Soft Tissue Release
This is the starting point when preparing for a training session.
We can think of soft tissue work as the poor man’s massage and it’s performed with a foam roller, lacrosse ball, or stick.
Soft-Tissue work is by no means a cure-all as it doesn’t break up scar tissue or fix injuries. It’s simply a tool to help release the muscular tension within the muscle fiber. When you use a foam roller and touch upon an area where the muscle’s tenderness feels like a “knot”. This is exactly where we to focus on.
While doing soft tissue work, we want to go hunting for these trigger points that feel especially sensitive or tight. You’ll know it when you find it as it would be somewhat painful.
The goal isn’t a comprehensive self-massage, but to address the painful “trigger points” within the muscle tissue to allow it to be more efficiently improved within the warm-up.
Prioritize 1-2 tender areas, focusing on deep breaths and investing 30-60 seconds per area. This won’t completely alleviate the tenderness, but it will open up the area to be stretch, mobilized, and corrected more effectively as we move through the remainder of the warm-up
Fight the urge to foam roll your entire body and waste away precious time by overdoing this phase of the warm-up. Instead, focus on performing small micro-movements of your body moving over the foam roller.
Here are the areas you need to address within this warm-up phase. Again, you only need to focus on 1-2 tender areas while actively searching for those “trigger points” within the muscle fiber.
Lower Body
Upper Body
Phase 2: Bi-Phasic Stretching
The vast majority of individuals cringe when they hear the word “stretching” within a dynamic warm-up. However, contrary to popular belief, there’s actually very little evidence that stretching impacts power, strength, or performance in general. At the same time, there’s no need to waste countless minute4s holding uncomfortable stretching because of “feel”
To strategically stretch in preparation for training, the focus needs to be placed on bi-phasic stretching. The “biphasic” part means that you’ll be performing those stretching micro-movements followed up with 15-30 seconds of end-range stretching. All and all, this should take no more than 2 minutes to complete.
By combining both the soft tissue and bi-phasic stretching will allow the human body to move and function as authentically as possible. This means these two phases are working together to improve the muscle tissue for the best results possible. These two phrases go hand in hand with each other as an integrated unit.
The common areas to address in the lower body include the hip flexors, quadriceps, and glutes. In the upper body, the areas in dire need are the pecs, lats, and posterior shoulder.
Here are some of my favorite Bi-Phasic Stretches:
Phase 3: Mobility and/or Corrective Exercises
Once the soft-tissue work and bi-phasic stretching have been completed, it’s time to work on improving overall movement quality as a whole through corrective exercises.
Corrective exercises are specific movements that are programmed to improve faulty movement patterns. They’re meant to correct dysfunctional movement and enhance motor control.
All three phases work together in synergy to improve your movement quality, reduce injury risk while improving training performance.
For corrective exercises, it’s less about quantity and more about quality; every single rep requires you to focus and perform with precision. Mobility and corrective exercises should look smooth, effortless, and coordinated
Remember, the ultimate goal of the warm is to get into training efficiently and effectively.
Corrective exercises are just one part of the preparation; the actual training is what makes everything stick.
Here are some of my favorite correctives exercises that just about everyone can benefit from:
Phase 4: Muscle Activation Drills
As to this point, we’ve been focusing on opening up a movement pattern into a newfound range of motion. However, we need to now work on activating and stabilizing that newfound range of motion. That’s where muscle activation drills come into play.
Activation drills that produce results need to involve a high degree of mind-muscle connection. In order to optimally “activate” a muscle, you need to be able to feel the muscle contract, then be able to carry over that feeling into your training.
No matter the exercise, think about squeezing the muscles as hard as possible to hardwiring the connections of the muscle.
The primary focus is activation and stimulation, not annihilation as the latter will lead to fatigue and a drop in performance during the workout
The activation drills selected here need to coincide with the previously addressed areas.
For example, if in phases 1-3, you’ve worked on mobilizing the pecs and enhancing T-spine rotation, then band pull apart and face pulls are a phenomenal option to activate the upper back.
For the lower body, if you’ve been working on mobilizing the quads, then glute bridges, band pull thoughts, and/or physio-ball hamstring curls are valuable.
Here are some of my favorite muscle Activation drills:
Phase 5: Foundational Movement Pattern Mastery
The first 4 phases of our warm-up sequence are all precursors to this; the job of this phase is to groove and ingrain new patterns to the foundational movements in order to transfer them into loaded movements.
Deciding which movement to perform here is simple: mimic the main exercise of the day with a regressed form of the exercise.
If you’re squatting, you’ll do either bodyweight squats or light goblet squats. If you’re deadlifting, you’ll do perfectly executed RDL’s. If you’re bench pressing, you’ll do push-ups. Simple, easy, and highly effective.
During this phase, you’ll do 2-3 rounds of 3-5 reps, emphasizing tempo, feel, and perfect execution.
Here are a few of my favorite:
Bodyweight Squat ( + Variations)
Phase 6: Central Nervous System Priming
You’re almost ready to start setting new training records.
After spending some thought practice on your foundational movement pattern of the day, it’s time to focus on being an explosive and powerful athlete with some Central Nervous system (CNS) priming.
Within this phase of the warm-up, the ideal fit for priming the CNS are explosive jumps and throws. Similar to the foundation movement, we’ll be pairing these explosive movements with the big movement of the day. For example, for squat-based movements, pick a vertical jump. For deadlift, broad jumps or bounds are an excellent choice. For bench press or back day, choosing medicine balls presses and slams is ideal.
Do 2-3 rounds of 1-5 reps, emphasizing explosiveness and perfect execution. Here are a few of my favorites:
Putting Everything Together
At this point, you may wonder how long everything will take?
All in all, this warm-up sequence should take you 6 minutes to complete. However, if you’re more banged up, then it will be closer to 10-12 minutes. Regardless, this is will far more efficient than foam rolling aimlessly for the majority of your training session.
Here’s how this perfect warm-up sequence looks for preparing for your main exercise.
Bench Press Day
Phase 1: Foam Roll Upper Back (30 seconds)
Phase 2: Lat Stretch (30 seconds)
Phase 3: Quad T-Spine 3x6 reps ea.
Phase 4: Rusin Tri-Set 3x10 reps ea.
Phase 5: Bodyweight Push-Ups 3x3 reps
Phase 6: Bent over MB Slams 3x3 reps
Squat Day
Phase 1: Foam Roll Quads (30 seconds ea)
Phase 2: Couch Stretch (30 seconds ea.)
Phase 3: Single Leg Lowers 2x8 reps ea.
Phase 4: Glute Bridges 2x10 reps
Phase 5: Goblet Squats 3x5 reps
Phase 6: Vertical Jump 3x3 reps
Deadlift Day
Phase 1: Foam Roll Hamstrings (30 seconds ea.)
Phase 2: Half Kneeling Adductor Strech (30 seconds ea.)
Phase 3: Single Leg Lowers 2 x 10 reps ea.
Phase 4: Glute Bridges 2 x 8 reps
Phase 5: Goblet Squat w/ RDL 3 x 5 reps ea.
Phase 6: Broad Jumps 3 x 1 rep
Pull-ups and/or Overhead Press
Phase 1: Foam Roll Upper Back (45 Seconds)
Phase 2: Bench T-Spine (45 Seconds)
Phase 3: Floor Slides 2x8reps
Phase 4: Bentover Lat Pulldowns 2x8 reps
Phase 5: TRX Rows 3x5 reps
Phase 6: MB Slams 3x3 reps
The Next Steps
While this may look imitating at first, you’ll quickly realize how efficient and effective your warms ups become. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much better and stronger your training sessions feels!
The goal of this guide (and online coaching) is to empower you through education.
I want to help you stop guessing when it comes to making sustainable progress and start achieving the results you desire.
So, what is your next step?
Realize that all the knowledge you’ve gained from this guide doesn’t equal real change.
If you’re fed up with how COVID fucked up your year, invest in a coach.
If you’ve read LITERALLY DOZENS of guides like this in the past and still haven’t made the change nor the confidence you want, invert in a coach.
If you’re overwhelmed by the content in this article, invest in a coach.
If you cannot be consistent with the strategies within this article, invest in a coach.
If you are ready for a change, I’m here to coach you.