Best Warm Up Exercises Before Weight Training

A proper weight training warm up is much more than just getting a sweat going. It’s focused on preparing your joints, muscles, and nervous system for the given task of the day. If done correctly, the warm up you should also help prevent any injuries from occurring.  Below we’ll talk about how we at Fusion Performance Training set up our warm up routines for our lifting days. If everything was perfect we would have a warm up that includes the following:

• Soft tissue work- foam roller, the stick, or the “power plate”.
• Mobility- range of motion through a specific movement pattern i.e. squat = mobility through the hips.
• Flexibility (static & dynamic)- range of motion through a static movement.
• Activation- (muscle/nervous) “reawakening” inhibited muscles to develop stability.

Depending on the needs of the lifter and workout, we’ll make specific modifications, but for this case we’ll use a general warm up template.

Soft Tissue Work

We typically start with some sort of soft tissue work using different modalities such as:

• Lacrosse ball- used on foot, hips, upper back, traps, delts, pecs etc…
• Foam roller- total body
• Stick- total body
• Power Plate- total body- we’ll also use this during our mobility section.

This phase of the warm up has now loosened/relaxed the muscles and will allows us to get into better positions during the stretches and mobility section.

Static Stretch

While the NY TImes had blasted static stretching (based on a research paper) for diminishing power output I haven’t found it to be negatively effecting our athletes, I’ll have to explain in-depth why I’m not a big fan of cutting out static stretching for our guys in another post.

Throughout my experience at the college level and as a NYC personal trainer, I find that many people benefit from targeted static stretching. Finding the tighter areas and stretching them out can help you obtain a greater range of motion i.e. the first pull of a deadlift- most people start with a rounded back because they are so tight.

For static stretching I’m a huge fan of band stretches shown here:

Click HERE for a few more band stretches.

Mobility and Dynamic Stretching

This is where we’ll start to really work on the range of motion and get that “sweat” going. There are many exercises you can do here from:

• Thoracic Rotation
• Straight leg marches
• A skips
• Adductor rock back
• Spiderman walks

Depending on how much space you have the needs of the lifter will determine what exercises you places here. Meaning if the lifter is particularly tight in the hamstrings you may spend more time doing straight leg marches and hamstring flexibility exercises. Here’s a video of the thoracic rotation and the benefits of breathing and EASING into a new range of motion:

Muscle Activation

This is where we are targeting specific muscles to “reawaken” to help stabilize the joint and movement. We’ll typically end with this as we want the lifter to be prepared for the upcoming exercise.

Muscle activation can be simple things such as the “Terminal Knee Extension” to help stabilize the knee during the squat, shown here:

Here is a shoulder activation series to get you prepared for your upper body movements:

Fusion Performance Training Warm Up

Being a Manhattan personal trainer, we generally don’t have much space. Because of this I’ve created a simple floor routine that hits all the above sections (mobility, flexibility, and activation). Here’s the video:

For time sake I omitted the foam roller section and activation. To give you an idea of how we do things, for the foam roller, we focus on the “tender” areas and breeze through the rest – we’ll target the other areas during our recovery days. The activation will be dependent on the needs of the lifter, i.e. if the lifter had knee problems we’ll do TKE’s and banded lateral walks to help activate the glutes medius and VMO. Then do reverse lunges and reaches to activation the muscle through a complex and dynamic movement.