Bonus Episode: Warm-Ups

0:00Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Hey, it's Jordan from Barbell Medicine. Now this episode preview is from exclusive content that regularly goes out to our Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers. In addition to exclusive content, Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers get early access to episodes and products, ad-free listening, discounts on products and services, and the ability to ask Dr. Baraki and I questions, all for about the cost of a cup of coffee each month. And in case you were wondering, the first month is free. To join, head over to barbellmedicine.com slash plus and sign up to be a Barbell Medicine Plus member today. That's barbellmedicine.com slash plus.

0:31Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:All right. Thanks for your consideration. On to the show. Welcome back to the Barbell Medicine Podcast where we bring modern medicine to strength and conditioning and strength and conditioning to modern medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum, and this is our 11th episode of the Barbell Medicine Plus Ask Us Anything. I have the second most handsome doctor in North America. On the other end of the line is Dr. Austin Baraki. What's going on, man?

0:54Dr. Austin Baraki:Hey, I'm here. I'm feeling all right. Things are going okay. Training, looking up. So no complaints today.

1:00Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Now, if you guys aren't watching this on video, you can't see this, but I need to appreciate that Dr. Baraki is letting the top of his hair grow out a little bit longer. He's got a little curl coming down the side and nice. Not intentional, but sure. Yeah. Fashionable. Nice. We have a bunch of questions. Thank you guys so much for submitting them. if we didn't get to your question this time, because some of the questions come in like a day or two before we actually record this. And I want to make sure I get to them. So I've added them to the next one, but make sure to get your next questions in.

1:32Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Ideally before like the 10th or the 11th of September. And then that'll be on the next edition of the Ask Us Anything. A few announcements. We did just release the second generation low fatigue template. We're going to talk about that more in this particular episode. But if you hadn't seen the free extended sample we put up for the Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers, if you hadn't heard, well, you get a discount on it too because you're a Barbell Medicine Plus member. Thank you so much. We'll talk about all the specifics of the new edition in this particular episode. Also coming up about a month from now, we'll be in San Antonio, Texas for a live in-person seminar at one of our new coaches, Sal, his gym in San Antonio.

2:13Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:So if you want to learn what we know about health, fitness, performance, et cetera, it would be a great opportunity for you to come and hang out. We're going to do some stuff where we train with the folks on Friday before the seminar. I think we're having dinner together Saturday night. So it's not just like, hey, come listen to us talk. It's like come hang out. And if you're a Supercast member, you also get a seminar discount. So if you're having issues accessing any of the additional perks, make sure you email us, support at barbellmedicine.com. We can help you out, but hope to see you there.

2:43Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:All right, let's get it cracking here on the 11th episode of the Barbell Medicine Plus Ask Us Anything. First question. So this user asks, I apologize as I am sure this has probably been asked and answered several times over the years. My current method of warmup is typically three or four sets with an empty bar, and then I add weight, usually starting with the 25-pound plates on lifts like the squat and the deadlift. I'm wondering if I'm spending too much time on warmups and making my work sets lower than their potential because of accumulating fatigue. For example, on deadlifts, I go empty bar, 95 pounds, 135, 185, 225, 275, always using those 25-pound plates in between full 45-pound plates.

3:23Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:I recently tried doing my deadlifts starting at 135 after the empty bar and then doing full plate jumps and was able to get to a higher working set than I had previously been able to achieve. I was wondering if I should try the same thing with my squat and other lifts making bigger plate jumps. What do? Yeah, good question. I actually don't know that we've tackled this in some sort of like systematic way. We talk about how to warm up, but mostly that's around like, look, if you want to do a quote general warmup where you're like stretching or doing other like things non-specific to what you're about to do, that's generally not how we would advise people to spend their time, mostly because time is such a big, it's such a precious commodity when it comes to not only just life, but certainly training, right?

4:06Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:And so that's been the focus of most of our discussion. But as far as like how many warm-up sets should you have or what's the purpose of a warm-up? Is it actually useful? I don't know that we've tackled that in a systematic way. Can you remember if we've done that?

4:18Dr. Austin Baraki:No, it's been a long time since we've talked about warming up at all. I think the last one that comes to mind is when we made a video of you and I both warming up at the gym in Chicago when we were there to teach a seminar several years back.

4:28Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Yeah, yeah, that's about right. All right, so let's talk about this maybe from coming up with a central paradigm. What is the point of a warm-up anyway? and that might guide sort of thoughts and subsequent like what do you do for a warmup. So the goal of a warmup is to improve performance in the subsequent task or in this case a workout in order to maximize the returns you're getting from what you're doing. So theoretically a good warmup would allow an individual to complete greater training load. So that's not just weight on the bar but also like more volume for example, more total training load and ideally less injury risk.

5:04Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Those are like the two major kind of outcomes you'd be looking at here from a single session. And then over a series of sessions, you'd like, well, look, if I do this particular warmup, I get better hypertrophy. I get better strength gain. I get better cardiorespiratory fitness improvements. I get reduced incidence of injury. So that's kind of how you would use like assess like is this warmup good or not? As far as how to do this to me, and I want to get your take on this. I kind of view there's like three – two major components like of a good warmup. One is psychological. The other one is physiological.

5:39Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:So psychological type of functions of a warmup. Make sure that you have the correct level of arousal. You often talk about the Yerkes-Dodson law here. Maybe refine your expectations about around a workout and like the loading on the bar, for example. It kind of gives you real-time information on like your performance potential for the day, how you're moving, how you're feeling, things of that nature. And for folks who had previously maybe been coming off of an injury or have been dealing with an injury, maybe some pain desensitization. I think those are like the three major like psychologically-based elements of a good warm-up.

6:15And then physiologically, sure, we're going to warm up – literally warm up the muscle, making it increase in temperature, which things tend to move a little bit better in the body when they're a little warmer.

6:26Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:that's decreased viscosity in the muscle, things of that nature. And also you get some skill practice with the movement that you're trying to do. So those are the two major kind of functions of a warmup as far as I'm breaking it down. Does that make sense to you?

6:41Dr. Austin Baraki:Yeah, I like it. And it also leaves room for the concept that your warmup doesn't need to be the same thing all the time. In other words, there's room for it to adjust based on the intent of the session, right? So you and I, we might have certain things that are common elements of our warmup from session to session. But if it's like a really important session, the degree of arousal and expectations and all sorts of other things going into that session or during a warmup are going to be very different than just a lighter accessory day or if you're going in just for some low intensity conditioning or something like that.

7:14Dr. Austin Baraki:And so I think that whether you're warming up, quote unquote, correctly or in an ideal way or whether you're warming up too much or too little, the answer to that is also going to depend on the intent and the purpose of the session. So contrasting those is a useful way to think about this too.

7:29Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Yeah, I agree. There's like this third maybe element of a warmup that I kind of want to put a bug in your ear as far as like maybe something we hadn't really discussed before, maybe we haven't codified it in our discussion of this. But if you look over like a training year, Right? How much time people spend warming up, that presents an opportunity to accumulate a lot of exercise volume that you could maybe apply for improving various other aspects of fitness, whether it's skill-related, whether it's conditioning, whether it's flexibility requirements for your sport. So it's just another opportunity to accumulate training load.

8:05Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:So actually you could improve fitness via some specific elements of the warm-up. So I just think about those three general things. We want to make sure that the person is prepared from a psychological standpoint. We want to make sure that they're prepared from a physiological standpoint. And to the extent we can use the warm-up to otherwise improve fitness, let's do that. So let's talk about how to do it. So and maybe to the crux of this person's question, like where's the line in the sand that you're drawing from like too much warm-up where it actually causes a sufficient amount of fatigue that it lowers how much training load that they can do versus, oh, this is too little warm-up.

8:45Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:And so you actually don't perform up to your potential and maybe increase the risk of injury. So those – that's maybe the first thought here. So as far as how to do it, I generally think for people when we're talking about barbell sport athletes, whether you're a powerlifter, Olympic weightlifter, strongman, CrossFit, or somebody just training for health and fitness, I don't think the general warm-up – so nonspecific warm-up elements really have a lot of, I guess, application here, meaning like jumping jacks, for example, or skipping rope or whatever or riding a bike for five minutes just to, quote, warm-up.

9:24Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Like this general thing, it's not specific to what you're doing. In this case, squatting first, deadlifting first, something like that. It doesn't mean that it's bad, but there's a cost there. It's time, right? And whether that represents the time that you could otherwise spend training or you could otherwise spend with your family, I think it just depends what would you otherwise spend that time on and such. But I don't know that I can draw a line in the sand and say, look, if you do – if you warm up for more than, quote, 15 minutes, then your fatigue is going to be too high. Or if you warm up for less than five minutes, you're not going to be warmed up enough to maximize your potential.

9:58Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:It's going to be individualized, not only for the workout, like what you're actually doing, but also for the individual. Does that make sense to you?

10:05Dr. Austin Baraki:Yeah, and even within the person, at different points in time, they may have different experiences with this. I mean, I know that my warm-up process and strategy and how I feel and all that tends to feel different depending on, you know, is it a – like this morning, I actually was at the gym because I had a lot going on today and started warming up at like 6 a.m., right? not my usual, but today is that's when I needed to get it done. Other times later in the evening, other times, perfect mid afternoon or late morning time slot, sometimes after a 24 hour shift, sometimes, you know, and so all those are going to have some differences where, you know, over time, you build up enough experience to where you can kind of derive real time feedback in the same way that we use, you know, maybe some RPE and auto regulation strategy to select our top weights, you kind of develop that feel for am I sufficiently warmed up to do what I'm trying to do today.

10:51Dr. Austin Baraki:And I know that's a little vague and hand wavy, but that's something that does admittedly come with experience and why it's worth paying attention to these kind of these things. So you have that what we'll call like an interoceptive, you know, ability to be quote unquote, like in tune with your body and be able to sense those things as accurately as it's possible to sense them at all. Yeah.

11:09Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:The other thing that you're going to have some sort of sense of for each workout is how much time to actually have. So, for example, if it's like you don't you know, you're not coming off shift, you don't have dinner plans or whatever. You're like, bro, I got as much time as I want. So you can spend more time warming up, doing whatever, taking time between, you know, to rest and whatever. Whereas if you're like, I got 45 minutes, I need to get something in. My warmups are going to be compressed. I might, you know, be super setting stuff. I might be doing things differently just because of that time availability, which kind of.

11:40Yeah.

11:40Dr. Austin Baraki:If you're trying to go viral on YouTube, you do an eight minute squat session and everybody loses their minds. That's right. Wow. I can't believe you did that.

11:46Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:So, yeah. Yeah. So with respect to this practical implementation, I think that there – maybe this is a good framework for it is that there's like a bare minimum and then there's like a maximal type of warm-up. So for a bare minimum, I think that people should have the specific elements included in the warm-up, which means whatever your exercise that you're starting out with, you should be doing that for your specific warm-up, starting with a lower amplitude, lower intensity version of that activity and then gradually progressing towards what you're going to be doing. For the workout, in this case, like work sets for the squat, the deadlift, whatever.

12:21Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:But if it was running at a particular speed, you would be doing maybe some walking, some slow speed jogging. It could be a cross training, for example, depending on the activity. But something that's just lower intensity, lower amplitude, but does relate to what you're doing and that gradually builds up. And that's probably the shortest way to get from just walk to the gym to I'm starting my work sets. And then I don't know that there's a like specific number of sets that I would routinely recommend. This guy says he's doing three or four sets. I'm like, that seems fine.

12:54Dr. Austin Baraki:If he's doing 10 or 12 sets, I'm like, well, it's probably a little bit too much.

12:58Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:But I don't also know that it's detrimental because you and I would predict that 10 or 12 sets of warm-ups would sure likely cause some fatigue, right? And that would compromise the person's top-end performance during training by some non-zero amount. How much is going to be related to how fit they are and the actual programming? But I don't know that I care because during a workout, we're not testing really. That's not the goal of the workout. You do get some information back on how well you're performing, but we're really building. And so if it's 5 % lighter, 10 % lighter than it otherwise would be, I don't think that reduces the amount of adaptations that a person gets.

13:36Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:The weight is just lower, but it wasn't a test anyway, so who cares, right? It's more like you have to make the argument that, like, look, if I work up to a squat that's 315 for a couple sets of four, that's reliably better than working up to 295 or 285 for the same sets of four. By the way, I had more volume on the way up due to my extended warmup. I don't know that I would feel confident about saying that.

14:00Dr. Austin Baraki:Yeah, it depends on, you know, if we're saying we're going to assess your outcomes a year later or five years later, then yeah, that's unlikely to make the difference. But at the same time, I totally understand somebody who's like, well, if I was otherwise capable of handling a bit more load at the same level of relative effort and fatigue today, I would prefer to do that than not. I think that we totally understand that mentality. But if your thought process is like this is specifically going to be the game changer for like where I end up a decade from now in my training, I don't think that we would be on board with that.

14:29Dr. Austin Baraki:But most people don't tend to think about their day-to-day training activities through that lens.

14:33Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:No. So just like for a minimizer or like a bare minimum type of warmup, I'm thinking three to five sets of progressively increasing weight. The jumps at the beginning are likely going to be bigger than the jumps at the end. And so for this particular individual, I think I would not start with a 95-pound deadlift for somebody who's going to be deadlifting more than 200 and something pounds. Just start with 135 or 60 kilos depending on where you're at in the world. For a squat, if you want to start with 95, like I've done that before, particularly when I'm either stiff or feeling some pain or whatever.

15:06Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:That's also my favorite thing to do in the warm-up room is to start with like 40 kilos and then end up at 200 kilos rather than like, you know, I'm starting with 70 kilos. I can do that, but like I just want to make sure that I get some opportunity to move in a low-stakes type of situation, which lower stakes, lower weight in this particular situation. So that's like a bare minimum type recommendation. For a maximizer or somebody who has extended time and maybe wants to optimize their warm-up through the lens of like long-term training adaptations, fitness adaptations, I still think that specific component is – that's gold.

15:43Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:Keep that. But then let's add on to that. And so what I would think about is before then, any sort of fitness-related adaptations, fitness-related characteristics that you'd want to develop, that's an opportunity for you to practice them under a, you know, again, low-stakes type of situation. So if it's a skill thing for like CrossFit, so for example, when I was doing CrossFit, we would start with some front rack like practice and like overhead position type practice because I just needed more exposure to those. So it's an empty bar, dowel, training bar, something like that, and double under practice because I was bad at double unders, but not a near maximal set of double unders, nothing too high intensity, but it's just – you're just getting reps in, right?

16:23Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum:And I would set a timer. All right, five minutes, I'm practicing my Sotspress, for example. Five minutes, I'm practicing a full hand around front rack position. Five minutes, I'm practicing double unders. And again, you're just – yeah, one workout is not going to make a big difference. But if I worked out 300 days out of the year or whatever and I did 250 of those workouts with some of the skill exposure, well, that's likely to improve my fitness through that. that so i kind of think about warm-ups in those two type senses and that's kind of my recommendation

16:56Dr. Austin Baraki:yeah i think this person for their specific scenario for a practical takeaway i definitely like the idea of like hey experiment with dropping out some of the increments at the lower end of the range because you can afford to make those bigger jumps and you're not likely to accidentally overshoot in that territory right but once you are approaching the weight where it's like okay based on my rpe target for the day or my load target i need to actually have a better sense of like, is that going to be the right weight for today or not? That's when you might need to get a little bit finer jumps or, um, you know, smaller increments to be able to fine tune that.

17:27Dr. Austin Baraki:I think we've talked about before, like our quote unquote indicator weights of like, I'll lift this weight. And that's what tells me, am I good to jump to this? Or do I need to hold it down to that? Neither of us can really tell from like 70 kilos, right? If that's going to be the case. But once we get up to, you know, 200 kilos, 220, 250, depending on the lift, whatever the case is, that's when we feel more confident. So that means that the lower weights are maybe a little bit more useful for like the physiologic aspects of the warmup. And then the higher end weights are more for like the fine tuning calibration, maybe even less psychological preparation of like, what's this about to feel like?