Everything You Need to Know About Warm Up

Injuries can hinder significantly the performance and journey of any trainee and athlete. In particular when it comes to resistance training (bodyweight or using weights), where progressing steadily over time plays such a crucial role in achieving one's objective.

Especially when warm up is not included in a training session, the risk of injury, even if not instant, can increase quite significantly over time, particularly if you are not very flexible and cannot stand the test of time (and load) on your joints and muscles. When training with weights, the risk of injury is not very high, generally speaking, especially for disciplines such as bodybuilding and powerlifting, where the weights lifted tend to be heavy, but movement patterns are quite linear and simple. This is not very similar to other more competitive sports such as football or basketball, in which the dynamic nature of them makes players more prone to injuries, more often.

One of the key elements that must be present in weight training when it comes to preventing injuries is correct form of execution. Performing every exercise with as close to perfect form as possible is crucial in technical disciplines such as resistance training based ones (e.g. bodybuilding, calisthenics, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting). And, one can argue, there is always margin of improvement in the execution of an exercise, which is something worth striving for in every training session. Besides perfect form, another pillar of injury prevention (and possibly performance enhancement) is warm up.

Warm up is often an avoided part of training programs and sessions, as considered by many gym goers a waste of time in the constant struggle to manage time as efficiently as possible. And yet warming up can be a crucial aspect of every workout and fitness journey. Not only due to its injury-prevention nature, but also as a (sort of) ritual to prepare the body and mind to enter into a training session with the highest state of preparedness. At the same time, warming up represents a great opportunity to improve mobility and flexibility, two fundamental aspects of longevity and general health.

But in order to make the case for the relevance of a well-crafted warm up routine in the domain of resistance training, we first need to get to the definition of warm up. That is because warming up does not merely concern increasing the body temperature in order to prime the body for the subsequent training session. An optimal warm up routine has the capacity to embody more than that: it can act as an opportunity to work on mobility improvement (i.e. the range of motion joints and muscles can handle dynamically); it can be the moment to begin the mental transition into "training mode" and the flow state.

When it comes to defining warm up, however, one gets to point out that warming up does not correspond to stretching (although stretching may be part of a warm up routine). In particular, warming up does not correspond to stretching in the meaning we generally allocate to it (i.e. static stretching, holding poses for several seconds in a static position). Static stretching can have a role at the end of a training bout, as a way of releasing tension from the muscles worked and improve flexibility. Static stretching is different from *dynamic *warm up. A dynamic warm up routine is considered much more appropriate as a pre-workout activation routine, while static stretching can have some significant disadvantages hindering performance if placed right before a training session.

As a matter of fact, dynamic warm up corresponds to performing a mobility drill for numerous repetitions, hence lengthening and shortening muscle fibers in a constant motion. This is very different from holding stretching poses, which instead lengthens muscle fibers, releasing energy from them. Because of the muscle-lengthening nature of static stretching, it is not considered optimal before a session, because by lengthening muscle fibers they become less capable of producing force, hence hindering optimal performance during the training bout. To dig deeper into the anatomy of a skeletal muscle fiber, here is a complete video.