Speaker 1Welcome back everyone to another episode of Hypertrophy Past and Present. Good morning. It's my morning for the first time. Normally I do. Last time I had an evening coffee and now it's a morning coffee for me. So good morning, Chris. How are you today?
Speaker 2I'm doing very well. Thank you. It's good to be back after all my travels. I've been jetting around all over the place. It's nice to be in a settled place for the time being at an undisclosed location. A little bit of stability.
Speaker 1How good. Just before we jump into today's episode, I do want to mention there's a few comments and stuff people have been leaving on the podcast. And thank you guys for engaging. Thank you guys for commenting and liking and sharing all that good stuff. I will just mention if you guys do have questions, both yourself and I, we both do Q&As every week. So if you do have questions on anything we've covered in a podcast or past episode or even things you want us to talk about, you're more than to engage in our Q&As. I love seeing the dialogue and the engagement on the podcast, but we don't tend to monitor that. There's much in answer questions there. So if you guys do have questions on what we're going to talk about today or what we've talked about in the past, hop onto our Instagram and engage in our Q&A. So let's jump into today's topic. Now I'm going to start with a plan. But before I start with our workout plan, I do want to just mention what we're actually going to talk about today and why I want to talk about this particular plan. And I want to give a little bit of context as to how this plan might be a little bit different to some other plans as well. So today we're going to talk about warming up. Warm up sets. What is a warm up? Why do it? Do you need to do it? How do you do it? And a question I get a lot with the silver area plans is what do they do for warm ups? And I think a lot of people have noticed, and you guys listening may have noticed, when I talk about these programs in the past, I often don't talk about any warming up. And that's because they often don't talk about any warming up. And there's a few exceptions to that. So I did want to mention, we have talked about a few of Reg Park's plans. And in my opinion, I'd say Reg Park is probably the most notable or explicit, I guess, with his types of warming up sets. So he does talk about them very clearly. And he does suggest doing two warm up sets before, like his five by five, the first two sets of those are warm up sets. And he actually explains like what percentages to use. And he's very clear with that. But that's a little bit of an outlier for some of these plans. And generally speaking, these plans, I'd say at least half the time, they don't talk about warming up at all. So I'm assuming that this is kind of like assumed knowledge. People kind of knew, what they were doing, right? So the plan I want to talk about today, they outline another way of warming up, which is different to what Reg suggested. This is probably the most common type of warming up I see talked about in the pre-storied era. So it's different to how Reg did it, where he did it specifically for those exercises he was doing in that workout. So today's plan is a York barbell plan. So we have talked about one York course in the past, which was the York Mr. America course. So York, obviously, is the most common type of warming up that I've seen in the pre-storied era. Obviously, the head of York barbell was Bob Hoffman, very, very influential figure in the silver era. He was an Olympic weightlifting coach for America. He coached many of the first Mr. Universes, including John Kremick. And yeah, arguably one of the, certainly one of the most influential people in pre-storied era bodybuilding. And this course comes from the first series of York courses. This is in fact the first York barbell course. So this was initially published, I believe in 1936. Again, obviously the date I'm working off the storage is early fifties. And so we're talking a couple of decades before then. And the course, I've mentioned this in the past, that obviously when it comes to sets and reps, there's a bit of leeway there. Obviously sets weren't commonly used, or they were kind of beginning to be used. And generally speaking, especially from a York barbell perspective, they were kind of pretty flexible with how one were to do that. So in this course, the initial instruction, we're to do one set of each of these exercises and you would do six, start with six repetitions. You would progress it to 12 or 10 or 12, depending on the exercise. And then you would add weight and come back down to six. But they did acknowledge, and especially Hoffman did acknowledge that if you were more advanced, you could certainly add a second set. He called it the heavy light method where you would do like a set of seven, then you would rest. It wasn't like a long rest. You would rest like 30 to 60 seconds type thing. You would reduce a bit of weight. And then you would do about 10% off the bar. And then you would do another set of seven or so. So that was kind of, you know, you had a bit of flexibility there on, on sets, but he did suggest everyone start just with this single set method first. So the first instruction given here is to start with a warming up exercise. Now, a common theme you do see with a lot of these lifters and these courses is they do actually suggest or emphasize how important it is to in fact be warm. Okay. Not even part of the warming up, but they say things like, you know, wear tracksuit pants and a hoodie if it's cold, or, you know, maybe go for a walk before you start lifting. Like this is emphasis on actually you want the muscles to be warm. Okay. And then assuming muscles are warm, what we're doing is starting with this warming up exercise. And essentially what they describe here is you use an empty bar and he, he specifically says having collars on a bar. I'm assuming that that is like a spacer. I'm not exactly sure, but he says like, you warm up and then you start lifting. So that's an empty bar on the floor and you pick it up. Basically he describes a deadlift position. And then he says, you suddenly, you quickly dynamically, you'll bring the bar up into that sort of hang position. And then you essentially do a snatch with it. So you bring the bar in front of you and then the bar overhead, and you finish in this overhead locked out position. And then you lower the bar again and you do this 12 times. So, and he's very clear that this is not a strength exercise. You are not trying to add weight. You're not trying to add weight. You're not trying to make this sort of challenging in terms of load. He says, this is an exercise to warm up your muscles. That is it, right? You do this 12 times, one set, and then you move into the workout. Now the first exercise is a barbell curl. And again, we're doing this single set six to 10 to 12. So barbell curl, then you go into a barbell overhead press. Then you go into a, what they call the deep knee bend on toes. So we're doing a heels elevated squat. Then we go into a barbell overhead press. Then we go into a two arm pullover. Now the pullover, I've talked about this in the past. Typically they're doing this with slightly higher repetitions and they're doing this a little bit away from, from failure. So they, they emphasize is like a light pullover. With this, they normally do like 10 to 20 repetitions. The idea here was you're breathing in really deeply, expanding the chest between the squats or after the squats. Then we go into a stiff leg deadlift. And then essentially what is a bench? So they call it a back press on a box or a bench or supine press, but essentially we're just doing a bench press on a bench. So they call it a back press on a box and we're just talking a bench press. And then we've got side bend. So you have the barbell on your back, like a squat and you're doing side bends with it. Then we have the Jefferson lift and then a standing calf raise. Now after the standing calf raise, he has like a little kind of almost like a superset here. And it is a, I believe we've talked about this maybe in one plan in the past, what they call a straddle hop, which is a bit of a funny one to imagine. So, and I haven't seen it make a recurrence since this time period. So I think it maybe fell out of favor, but what the straddle hop is, is essentially you're in the same position as you've just done the standing calf raise. You've got the barbell on your back using the same load, and then you have your feet together. You have your heels together. I think your toes may be pointing out a little bit and you essentially jump spreading your feet. He says 24 inches to the sides, and then you jump bringing your feet back together and you repeat this as many times as you can. So, and then you've got the barbell on your back using the same load, and then you have your feet together. So that's an interesting exercise choice. And then we concluded with a barbell shoulder, like a vertical shrug. So we have 10 exercises, well, 11 exercises, including the straddle hop, and 12, if we include the warming up exercise. Over to you, Chris, what do you see? What do you, what's your take on that?
Speaker 2What do I see? I imagine that most people who've been following that list of exercises through are not going to be surprised by what I now say, because I think it's relatively straightforward to see some of the, you know, positives and negatives in that, in that list. Interestingly, in previous episodes where we've analysed these programmes, we've, we've noticed that deadlift was surprisingly absent. We didn't feel like there was much use of a deadlift, despite the fact that it's quite an obvious thing to do if you don't have lots of equipment and you're in that kind of territory where you've got a barbell on the floor and you've got to do something with it. And the obvious thing to do is to pick it up. I mean, that, that would be the deadlift. We've got two deadlift variations here. One is the deadlift, and the other is the deadlift. So we've got two deadlift variations here. We've got a stiff leg and we've got the, we've got the Jefferson. So that's really, really interesting that we've got that usage of, of deadlifts in this programme. And of course, stiff leg again, solves one of the problems that I've argued before about some of these silver era routines, which is that hamstrings don't tend to get very much attention. And clearly here, we've got a stiff leg deadlift, which is not the most amazing exercise for the hamstrings, but it's definitely better than nothing, which is kind of one of the problems that we do tend to see with these routines. So that's what I would say is definitely a positive. Again, you know, kind of looking at negatives, as I always comment, there's very little lat, lat work here. There's very little back work here. So apart from the deadlift variations, which are obviously going to give you some back stimulus, there's no pulling exercises of any kind, really. There's no row and there's no lat pulldown, you know, and as I've mentioned before, those are not difficult exercises to do with minimal equipment. You can do rows relatively easily and you can do pull-ups relatively easily. So I don't know why we wouldn't have those. It makes very little sense to me to ignore them, especially when you're throwing things like you know kind of whatever that straddle hop thing is and you know sort of side bends i mean come on if you've got space in your program to do stuff like that you've got space in your program to do pull-ups and rows i mean come on let's be serious note on the side
Speaker 1bends because like i said this is very early this is 1936 right and what i do notice with side bends is they do get left behind so i don't know if people remember our first course we talked about the milo barbell course so that was like 1901 or something when that was published 1910 very early on they were using things like side bends and then we still see them here present in the 30s but then once we get to like the 40s and 50s most people have left them behind yeah absolutely i
Speaker 2think that's that's one of those interesting things where you know people observe the effects of exercises and they notice that it doesn't seem to be doing anything positive and it gets dropped you know and i think that's that's a nice thing about you know reading up on this and read and research this silver era material is because you can be relatively confident that those guys were noticing things and it was meaningful observations of course now when everybody's growing all the time because of anabolics you can't really make those observations it's like well everything's growing so what's working i don't know um you know it's nice to have that ability to you know notice when things are working so that that would really be only my only observations really i don't i don't have anything particularly exciting it's nice again we've got both bench presses and overhead presses i mean obviously we've talked about this and you've explained how aesthetics changed over time and in the earliest programs you didn't send you didn't tend to get bench pressing because there's no real chest emphasis at all as aesthetics changed in people but we had more shoulder work in the beginning and now we've got less shoulder work direct and we've got the bench pressings in in its place so again just repeating
Speaker 1what we said before one other thing i want to highlight here is the exercise order i don't know if you'll agree with me in this but if we look at so we start starting with a curl like a lot of these plants start with a curl and often i hear people say how would you do that wouldn't you put that last so you know it doesn't make more sense to do that and you know normally people say after back and as you pointed out there's not a lot of back here but we go from a curl to an overhead press now obviously the overhead press you're going to be using more weight than the curl i would assume and then we go into the squat which again is going to really be more weight they do say you start with the load that you use for your overhead right but then obviously you're going to progress at different paces and then the stiff leg which again you start at a similar weight but i assume they're probably going to be able to use more load there as well and then it's almost like we reset so then we kind of go back to the bench we'll go low end weight again then to the jefferson lift or side exercise the jefferson lift and then the shrug and there's almost like generally this ascending kind of load that'll be used throughout the workout and in the context of warming up and understanding that apart from this dynamic exercise we're going to be using more weight and then we're going to go back to the exercise i was doing at the start this olympic lift there's no other real warm-up i wonder if that exercise selection in some ways maybe was intentional around that like a the fact they're using lighter loads b that we're going from an overhead press into a um like a bench later on or we're going from a squat into the stiff leg deadlift like i wonder if if that ordering or that sequence kind of helps that like if you were to start with a stiff leg deadlift and it's more challenging or or you know uncomfortable in this context where you're not warming up then if you're to start with curls and overhead etc i was
Speaker 2wondering about whether there might be an element of practicality because and it doesn't look like it works perfectly at all but you could imagine a scenario where if you're a relatively sort of strong guy and you've got one barbell and you want to do a whole sequence of exercises you don't really want to be doing you know sort of i mean for example you don't want to be doing biceps curls and then deadlifts and then and then and then going back to you know i don't know something uh you know equally uh light so you're kind of spending your life putting plates on and off the barbell whereas if you have something like biceps curls and then overhead press you're putting some plates on but not a lot and then you go from the overhead press to the squat you're going to put a whole load of other plates on top of that i can kind of see maybe there's a sort of and it breaks down after that the pattern doesn't really work you know but i can kind of see a scenario in which you might plan your not necessarily around you know ideal exercise order like we might do we might walk into a gym and go oh i can do that exercise on that machine and i can walk over there and do that on that and it's all selectorized and i don't have to carry plates around whereas they're in a different situation they've got these limitations on them that are actually practical so maybe there's a little bit of that there and it as i say it doesn't work perfectly at all after you get to the squat exercise after that it kind of messes around a little bit you can kind of see a scenario where you might have a requirement to uh you know move from exercises that use less weight to those that use more weight and then come back down again now i would reorder the exercises here if i was if i was genuinely doing that but it does it does kind of strike me definitely those first three exercises yeah you strike me as potentially a sequential order of using more and more weight from one exercise to the next other than that i'm not really seeing anything that i would uh i would kind of point to
Speaker 1what's your take on that warming up exercise
Speaker 2so obviously hoffman was a olympic coach so he's gonna you know kind of naturally sort of choose something that is basically an olympic lifting warm-up um or part of one so i'm not surprised that he's got that there the question is what you know does it really do in the context of somebody who's not then doing olympic lifts you know as part of their routine you know there's no olympic lifts in this there's bits of exercise that are not part of their routine you know there's no olympic lifts in this exercise that you could say are close to olympic lifts you know you've got shrug in there you've got uh sort of squat in there you've got deadlift in there you know there's little bits that you could kind of say are kind of close but they're not really requiring the kind of shoulder mobility um you know genuine whole body movement patterns that you would actually see in an olympic weight lifting exercise um i did actually wonder when you were describing the the straddle hop whether there might be some element of olympic lifting in there but it's not not really going in the same kind of field to it but ultimately i think probably what we're seeing there is is hoffman's olympic weightlifting background coming through in the kind of peripheral aspects of the workout i think that's probably all it is
Speaker 1with this straddle hop there's nothing that comes to mind for years to what that would be achieving no not at all no it is a it is definitely a funny one i have not seen anyone in the gym performing that um okay so the warming up exercise let's move on to what is it we are trying to achieve in a warm-up i think that's a really
Speaker 2really good question um so i might not be able to answer that immediately in terms of what we can achieve i think that what people are believing they're achieving is one of two things it's going to either be that they are somehow enhancing the stimuli that the workout is capable of achieving and secondly it's going to be that they're reducing the likelihood of injury risk could occur in the workout they're about to do so it's going to be one of those two things or both of them so ultimately what we want to answer then is what kind of warm-up might enable us to achieve those things and what do we need to know physiologically to be able to answer that question so really i think what we can do is identify two separate categories of physiological information that sit under those two headings so we've got the performance improvements leading to improved stimuli and then secondly we've got the injury risk reduction and under those under those two headings we can look at the warming up temperature wise of a muscle and separately we can look at post-activation potentiation and other potentiation mechanisms and we can look at those under each of those two headings of stimuli and injury prevention so if we start with the the warming up temperature what we're saying here is basically that if you physically warm a muscle up now conventionally this is done with low intensity aerobic exercise so if you do 15 to 20 minutes of low intensity aerobic exercise then the muscle that you're using so if you're on a treadmill it's the legs if you're on you know kind of uh sort of a bike that has handles to move that you can use the whole body then obviously you'll use more muscles of the upper body as well as the lower body but fundamentally the muscles you're using in the aerobic exercise will warm up and what you'll notice is that that temperature increase has an impact on the workout that you're about to do in terms of performance characteristics so the interesting thing is you can mimic that by literally just putting the muscle that you're testing in a bath of warm water so if you're going to do quadriceps testing you can literally have somebody sit in a bath of warm water and it will actually mimic the effect i'm about to describe from low intensity aerobic exercise so what happens is that the performance measures are like one rep maxes or for example high velocity performance for example you might test throwing ability or something like that they tend to increase quite noticeably now the interesting thing is the reason this happens is very well described what happens is that the actinomyosin cross bridges are essentially dependent on a temperature dependent supply of energy so if you are looking to create a high intensity aerobic exercise you're going to want to make sure that you have enough energy to activate cross bridges relatively rapidly you can do that more effectively you can do that more quickly if you have a higher temperature of the muscle if you start to sort of cool the muscle down what you'll notice is that the rate of cross bridge formations slows down now interestingly if you live in a cold country and you go outside and you forget your gloves you'll notice this straight away because what will happen is your hands will actually not be able to move anywhere near as quickly as they would do inside a warm building it actually doesn't change your grip strength that much it actually changes the speed of shortness of because it's mimicking essentially what metabolite-related fatigue does. It slows you down. because it slows down the rate of cross-bridge formations. Obviously the opposite, warming the muscle with either aerobic exercise or warm water will actually do the opposite and actually increase the rate of cross-bridge formations. Now, the question is then, answering the first question, does that change the stimuli for the workout, in the workout that we're going to do? Well, it depends on what you're trying to stimulate to happen. If you want to trigger, for example, adaptions relating to high-velocity movements, so let's say you're interested in triggering a speed-related adaption. You're an athlete or you're coaching athletes and you want the athlete to develop some speed-related adaptions like increased firing rates or increased muscle fibre shortening velocities, those kind of things. You'll notice actually that increasing muscle temperature helps you create the stimuli or a bigger stimuli for those adaptions. What is the fundamental characteristic that enables us to trigger an increase in rate coding in motor unit firing frequencies? Well, it's actually achieving a higher firing frequency. Well, how do we do that? Well, we move as fast as we possibly can. If temperature increasing allows us to move faster, then you'll actually hit a higher firing frequency and actually trigger an adaption to a greater extent. The same thing will happen with muscle fibre shortening velocity. And you can kind of start to see that the temperature-related, the sort of increase in muscle temperature actually is helping us trigger a stimulus, a bigger stimulus in those particular contexts. But if you were to say, well, okay, well, does that help me trigger a bigger hypertrophy stimulus? Well, no, it doesn't. Physiologically, it almost certainly doesn't. Now, the reason I say that. I say that is because if you look at what happens when you have a higher muscle temperature, you create more cross bridges more quickly. That's why we get the faster shortening velocity. That's why we get the faster rate coding as a result of the faster shortening velocity. If you are triggering more cross bridges per second, you'll develop more metabolite-related fatigue. So you'll actually hit failure earlier. So the thing is, you end up with the same dosage of total mechanical tension across your set because you're just producing cross bridges more quickly, assuming you want to do that. You may not actually do that. You may not actually want to do that. So you may actually just carry on using the same tempo as you were using before. But fundamentally, you can't actually change the mechanical tension stimulus by doing that because you just create more metabolite-related fatigue.
Speaker 1So from a hypertrophy perspective, it would be the equivalent to if you were to say reverse and an exercise to make the resistance profile more flat as opposed to.
Speaker 2Exactly. That's exactly what you would be doing. You would basically be creating more. Instead of having a very steep resistance profile and you're just kind of using a load of cross bridges of high threshold motor unit muscle fibers and one. That's a long part of the range of motion. You're basically what you're doing now is you're creating a larger range of motion where those cross bridges are required to form, flattening the resistance profile. And so what ends up happening is that you just end up failing earlier because the experience of each repetition is now harder. You're doing the same thing. So ultimately, you create the same stimulus at the end of the set as you would do if you hadn't done the warm-up. So the interesting thing is that increased muscle temperature is actually really interesting from an athletic point of view, especially on the speed end of the spectrum. It really does help that kind of adaption. Less so on the, I think, on the strength end. But, you know, maybe you can make an argument for being able to use slightly more weight and that greater weight, maybe having a tendon-related effect or a costumel-related effect. It's a very thin argument in comparison with the speed-related adaptions, which I think is a relatively solid one. Would there be an impact on coordination? So coordination obviously is velocity-specific. So if you move faster, you're going to have a better chance at practice. And if you're practicing with a faster speed, it's going to mostly again be at the speed end of the spectrum. I think the thing is, warming up prior to a workout is so much, so clearly beneficial for speed-related adaptions. It's not actually as clearly, obviously better for strength-related adaptions, and it's pretty much clearly not going to help from a hypertrophy point of view. So if people are listening to this and are literally only interested in bodybuilding, which is, I guess, a large portion of our sort of listening, this is not, warm-ups are not going to help you trigger a larger hypertrophy stimulus, I don't believe, because it's just going to create. The reality is people are using a fixed tempo or a self-selected kind of non-maximal tempo. They're not even going to be using the benefit that the warm-up gives them because the cross bridges are not going to form faster because they're just going to form at the speed that you tell them to form. So all that's going to happen is that you're going to, you know, kind of use the same amount. You're going to create the same amount of hypertrophy stimulus with the available cross bridges that you've got.
Speaker 1So you shouldn't notice an impact on, say, total repetitions in a set of sets.
Speaker 2I don't believe that you would see one, no.
Speaker 1Yeah, so even, because in my head, I'm wondering whether people would be thinking, well, is that going to influence measuring or tracking progressive overload? Sometimes I'm warmed up and sometimes I'm not.
Speaker 2Well, that brings us to the next physiological observation. So that was muscle temperature. How does muscle temperature affect, you know, kind of things? The stimuli for given adaptions. And what I've argued there is that I think it dramatically affects the possibility to trigger speed-related adaptions. And I've mentioned things like firing rate and muscle fibre shortening velocity. And you've also brought up the coordination factor, which again is definitely a possibility. The other category of physiologically relevant mechanisms are the post-activation potentiation or just generally potentiation mechanisms. So there are two kind of potentiation mechanisms that we would want to talk about here. One of these is the post-activation. One is the post-activation potentiation effect, PAP effect. And the other is the post-activation performance enhancement effect, PAPE effect. So we refer to those as PAP and PAPE. There's a section of my FAQ that explains why that happened. It's basically a historical issue. We actually originally referred to all temporary potentiation mechanisms as PAP effect. We've now separated PAP and PAPE off because PAP has a very clear physiological explanation for it. PAPE doesn't. And the PAP effect is a kind of a one to five minute effect, whereby you essentially get an instantaneous increase in force production across the entire force velocity spectrum as a result of the actin and myosin cross bridges moving closer. Sorry, not the cross bridges. Actin and myosin themselves move closer to each other. So you end up forming cross bridges more rapidly. Now, the interesting thing here is that that probably does increase performance even on a repetition strength issue. So if you're, I mean, obviously moving the myosin closer to actin, it will give you a higher one rep max. It'll give you a higher maximal kind of throwing speed and things like that. As I say, across the whole force velocity spectrum, it probably also increases rep strength. Now, the reason I say that is because we are increasing the efficiency of the cross bridge formation. We're not doing what I was talking about previously. We're creating more cross bridges per second. We are essentially increasing the efficiency of the contraction. So I think we probably would see a repetition strength. Now, I honestly don't know if that has been tested. So I'm going to kind of be cautious about saying that that's definitively going to happen. But I think that would be a potential way in which you would see an increase in, as you say, progressive overload. But definitively, we are going to see strength increases. We are going to see velocity increases. Now, how do you create a PAP effect? You create a PAP effect basically by activating the muscle fiber for a short period of time. Now, why I say very short period of time is because we have got data showing you can get PAP effects from like high velocity movements. So one of the most interesting practical applications of PAP effects is where you actually get somebody to do a maximal effort vertical jump, maybe 30 seconds to a minute before they do a set of squats, heavy squats. And you will actually notice an improvement in things like bar speed in that scenario and maybe even things like a three rep or one rep max. So some people have said, you know, PAP effects need like, you know, a certain period of time. It doesn't look like that. PAP effects look like they happen instantaneously as soon as you activate the relevant muscle fibers. So in practical terms, if you want to create a PAP effect because you're training an athlete that's doing fast kind of, you know, for speed related adaptions, for example, or even strength related adaptions because you will get a heavier load out of them if you can get the PAP effect implemented. You actually only need to do a fast, single fast velocity repetition and you've created the PAP effect. You don't need to do anything other than that. So it's actually very, very easy and simple thing to achieve. So in practical terms, if somebody wants that for a, a set of like hypertrophy type repetitions of doing bodybuilding, you're going to need to slightly reconstruct the way that you think about warmups because if you're doing, say, a set of repetitions to warm up and you're not doing any maximal efforts at any point, which is pretty normal. I mean, most people aren't going to do a maximal effort in their warmup before they do a set of, you know, kind of a set to failure. You are probably going to need to think about doing a single high effort repetition, even if that's with a lighter load to get that PAP effect. If you want to do that, whether or not this does, change the hypertrophy stimulus is really quite difficult to assess. Honestly, don't know. I wouldn't want to come down hard on either side of the debate here. Really at the moment, if it does change efficiency, maybe it does change the magnitude of the mechanical tension stimulus on the set. But honestly, I really wouldn't want to be committed to one side of the argument at this point. I think it's going to be interesting to see if people do more work on this and whether it turns out to be a relevant factor. But at the moment, I don't want to be too, committed either way. So the key part there is effort.
Speaker 1So it doesn't need to be a low weight or a vertical jump or something like that. It could actually just be a load that was like a five rep max or heavier and you could do a single repetition with that.
Speaker 2It could be absolutely any load at all. The problem you're going to have is that if you're trying to, say for example, you've worked your way through a set of warmup repetitions, however you normally do them, and you're now trying to integrate this concept into your routine, you could pick any load you like and as long as the effort level is high so that the recruitment is high you'll get the effect the problem is that if you pick a really heavy load like for example if you're planning to do five six rep max as your work set and you think oh i'll just do a single before i do that that's actually going to create quite a lot of fatigue because the duration of the rep is going to be quite slow and you're giving a lot of time for metabolites to accumulate and calcium ions to accumulate if you just drop the weight down slightly so that you can do the rep and it's over with and done it's like a 10 rep max or 12 rep max and it's pop and you've done it you're not going to get that same problem but you are still going to get the benefits yeah
Speaker 1so that would involve someone being very intentional about doing it you need to perform a max effort right so what i like about say if you were to use a heavy load say you do use a five rep max you do a single and then you would presumably you'd want to rest a full rest period before doing your working set even if you're not intentionally doing that effort that that rep with a high effort like it is happening by default whereas if you use a 10 rep max then what you're saying there like you need to intentionally be as fast as possible and
Speaker 2yeah absolutely i mean i think ultimately this is starting to move into practical territory where we're trying to sort of think about how to make it work but ultimately you know the the key physiological trigger is just achieving a activation of the relevant muscle fibers so yeah we can do that with any load you like you just have to use max effort the only then questions that follow up after that are is this practical do i create fatigue at the same time and that kind of stuff fundamentally physiologically it's just activating the fibers so in
Speaker 1the warming up exercise we described at the start presumably that would have had had a pap effect on some muscles or some muscle fibers then
Speaker 2yeah but it's only going to last for about five minutes max you're not going to get an effect lasting any longer than that so that's why i say one of the most interesting ways of using an athletic context is to do a fast single fast repetition like a jump or a throw you're not going to get an effect lasting any longer than that so that's why i say one of the most interesting ways of using an athletic context is to do a fast single fast repetition like a jump or a throw prior to doing a heavy strength training exercise that's a really nice way of doing it but ultimately you're only going to keep that effect for those couple of minutes before it dies away
Speaker 1there's a bit of debate happening online at the moment with this topic as to whether a unloaded i don't know what you would call it where you basically do the exercise you do a repetition unloaded so say you're doing a bicep curl without any bar you're literally just performing the motion of a biceps curl and as fast as possible and the question and just a single repetition and so there's debate over would that cause the pap effect or not
Speaker 2yeah i think it probably would i mean ultimately there's the question over are you are you capable of moving genuinely as fast as you possibly can when you've got to immediately start decelerating the moment you start the movement because when you do a movement like that and it's you've got i mean the thing about a jump is that you leave the ground so you don't need to worry about the end of the movement if you're doing something like a biceps curl you don't really want to finish the biceps curl in a way that you finish a jump where you literally just allow it to finish on its own because that's that's dangerous so you're going to start immediately decelerating as soon as you accelerate so the question is do you actually get to max speed in those single joint scenarios and i don't know i don't know the answer to that question but fundamentally physiologically yes a fast repetition if you do achieve max effort is enough you don't i mean that literally there are studies showing that for both upper body and lower body it's not controversial so in terms of hypertrophy yeah i'm not i'm not entirely sure whether it does actually benefit us or not it really comes down to you know are you getting a higher dosage of mechanical tension across the set by the movement of myosin closer to actin and that comes down to is it actually an efficiency modifier or is it just allowing you to produce more cross bridges in at the same period of time if it's in the genuine efficiency modifier you're actually doing something that's changing the efficiency of that con of that connection yes it will create a bigger mechanical tension stimulus if it's just allowing you to move more cross bridges in the same period of time then no it won't because you'll just get more metabolite related fatigue uh you know and therefore you'll end up in the same place as you would do if you're warming up with temperature increase that we talked about previously and i don't know the answer to that question i don't know whether it is an efficiency modifier i do
Speaker 1have one more question on this so if you were to do multiple sets then let's say your first set was into failure let's say you do two sets of eight to ten repetitions your first set you keep two reps in reserve and then your second set you go to failure presumably that first set has produced the pap effect for your second set yes but then the second question then is why in a single set why do you say you do 10 repetitions why does repetition six not produce a pap effect for repetition seven onwards it probably does
Speaker 2it probably does i mean the thing is most of these pap effect studies have been done with relatively small numbers of repetitions they're testing one rep maxes they're testing you know kind of jump heights you know kind of short distance sprint speeds that kind of thing so the chances are that we do get a pap effect towards the back end of the set so it really is probably just affecting the kind of early repetitions not really affecting much after that so again the question arises is you know is it even worth worrying about really tricky question tricky question okay
Speaker 1so so far we're landing at a place where from a hypertrophy perspective it's questionable whether warming up so far is providing much of a benefit
Speaker 2absolutely i mean the really the only other mechanism that we've got to describe is the pape effect so we've described the pap effect now the paper and unfortunately here we just don't know what's going on at all so in contrast to the pap effect we've got a very very well described physiological mechanism which is this moving of myosin closer to actin that is extremely well described we know exactly more or less exactly more or less we know how it works in contrast the paper effect is completely unknown we don't know the underlying mechanism we've got some data that has enabled us to rule out certain factors it looks like we can i mean you can read reviews on this stuff and people will talk around it and describe all the possibilities but the reality is we've got data showing that the paper effect is uh later in time so it kind of lasts longer than the pap effect up to about maybe even 15 minutes and in that period of time we've got data showing that you can produce a pape effect a potentiation effect even in the presence of supraspinal cns fatigue so that's really important because one of the most common um kind of claims on the internet is that warm-ups are about increasing the activation of the central nervous system no they're not we know they're not because the pap effect has got nothing to do with the central nervous system and the paper effect happens in the absence sorry in the presence of supraspinal cns t so again showing that it's not being generated by the central nervous system so when people say oh we're doing potentiation of activation exercises to get the cns to do something different um that's not what's happening we can rule out the cns being the the the factor that's changing um we can also rule out the muscle temperature being the factor because paper effects are actually triggered by things that don't warm the muscle up yes you can read reviews and they'll go maybe muscle temperature changes are a factor no they're not because you can literally create a paper effect in like a couple of seconds you can't warm a muscle up in a couple of seconds it doesn't work like that so it's very mysterious very very mysterious what's going on with this paper effect but it's probably local and until somebody figures out whether it's affecting the mechanical tension stimulus locally we're not going to know whether it's something that's helpful for hypertrophy ultimately you know that's kind of where we are we're stuck really until somebody does some more work on this this is one of those things it's like delayed onset muscle soreness you know i don't have an explanation that i can i think people just sort of assume that i've got an explanation for everything i don't there's there's things that i don't have data for enough data for to be able to pull a model together and paper effect is one of those things i don't have enough data for um you know i'd love to have more data for it because it's a really interesting phenomenon and if it does affect hypertrophy stimulus it would actually change things very slightly because you might want to try and trick sort of judge your rest period not just based on the fatiguing problems but also on catching the wave of your paper effect and that would mean you'd actually take quite a lot longer rests because paper effect tends to peak around eight minutes or so so very very approximately so instead of kind of going down the route of saying well we'd we'd use a rest period geared around letting supraspinal cns fatigue dissipate which is my current recommendation we might actually shift things and say well actually let's surf the wave of the paper effect now that would then push you towards maybe thinking about antagonist supersets or something like that so you could actually catch these kind of waves of paper effects in sequential exercises and without so there's some really really interesting implications of this being a thing and that's one of the reasons why i don't want to claim it's a thing until i know it's a thing because this actually has pretty profound implications for how you might structure a strength training program and so let me reiterate that i do not know yet whether or not the paper effect does change the mechanical tensions doing this i don't know the answer to that question so i'm not going to kind of suggest that anybody programs on that basis so what we can now do is we can say of these three things that we've described muscle temperature changes um you know kind of with generic warm-ups pap effects and paper effects does any of that stuff change injury prevention sorry does any of that stuff change injury risk and is it therefore worth doing from an injury prevention point of view so on this i can what i can point to very clearly is that increased muscle temperature does reduce the risk of muscle strain injury what it does is it actually requires more kinetic energy to be generated in order to uh actually a certain muscle length. So muscle strain injuries we can talk about in more detail at another time but fundamentally what happens is that when you stretch a muscle to a certain length it tends to tear and if you have a muscle that's capable of producing more force then you'll have to put in more kinetic energy to get to the tearing length. So things like increased muscle temperature have been shown to actually be quite beneficial for reducing muscle strain injury risk. So we could also hypothesize that PAP effects and PAPE effects would be similarly effective because they're increasing the capacity of the muscle to produce force and therefore increasing its ability to resist being lengthened to a tearing length. Now it's complicated to explain why that tearing length can be reached in a strength training situation but you know I can cover that in potentially a future conversation but essentially when you know we do do lots of kind of muscle damaging exercise you can actually reduce the tearing length to the point where it does occur inside of a exercise range of motion. So essentially summarizing muscle temperature definitely does reduce the risk of strain injury by making it harder for the muscle to get to the tearing length and we could therefore suppose not been tested but we could suppose that both PAPE and PAPE effects would do the same thing. So essentially I think there's a lot stronger argument for the purpose of a warm-up being for injury risk reduction than there is for it producing an increase in hypertrophy stimulus. I think that's very weak. In contrast I do think it's quite strong for speed related adaptions. So athletes who are training for high performance sport and high velocity movements I think that warm-ups will work both for the stimulus being increased for those adaptions that relate to speed as well as injury prevention and I think that probably is the kind of the group of people I would say warm-ups are most important for you guys. For hypertrophy training I think really unless it turns out that post-activation potentiation or PAPE either PAPE or PAPE are capable of increasing the mechanical tension stimulus I'm very skeptical. Very skeptical is probably a bit harsh. I am uncertain about whether that is a thing. I think it's much more going to be on the injury prevention side that we would do warm-ups for hypertrophy training.
Speaker 1So there's so many different ways people do warm-ups and there's obviously so much debate about you know how should they be done. Obviously what are they doing which you've covered so far. I want to cover as many of those questions as possible. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that? I think there's so many different ways to do warm-ups. Is there anything else you want to talk about theoretically before we jump into some of the application?
Speaker 2No I think we've covered everything there in terms of the physiology as I've hopefully laid it out. We've just got these three physiological things. We've got the temperature of the muscle. We've got the PAPE, the post-activation potentiation effect. We've got the PAPE, post-activation performance enhancement effect and we can look at those under the headings of both you know kind of stimuli for specific adaptions. Hypertrophy being the one that we're interested in most and then secondly we can look at it from an injury prevention point of view. So with that kind of covered everything that I wanted to say.
Speaker 1Great so I'm going to try to I guess verbalize maybe some of the questions people might have in their mind as listening to this and some of the questions I get a lot about warm-ups and one of them would be and this maybe ties into a little bit with the injury prevention I'm not sure but another reason I guess people might think about warm-ups is I might think well you know if I don't warm up I'm going to be stiff, my joints are going to ache, I pick up a heavy load and suddenly I feel like I'm going to break apart. What is it that you've that would be helping with some of that sort of sensation?
Speaker 2Obviously I'm not a physio, I'm not a doctor, I don't really know anything about that kind of stuff. I understand that exercise has a pain relieving effect so maybe there's something going on there but I don't know enough to comment intelligently. You know I think that's that's one of those questions you kind of got to ask a physio
Speaker 1really. So then in the context of say a squat, so say someone's doing a heavy squat and they don't warm up and they pick up a five rep max and they perform that squat and they barely completed, they feel weak, they feel like they're going to tumble over. Is there anything sort of happening there that you can comment on as to why maybe someone might feel weaker in a heavy lift like that without warming up?
Speaker 2So obviously we described how the kind of temperature related factor and the pap and the paper effects could all increase instantaneous strength. So essentially that would be one of the sort of underlying physiological reasons for that. You might also have psychological reasons for it. You know it might just be extremely scary and of course when we talk about you know motor unit recruitment we've always got this model of the psycho-biological model of fatigue. If you're dealing with emotions while you're trying to do an exercise you've got less capacity to produce motor unit recruitment because some of your perception of effort capacity is being devoted towards dealing with those emotions. So if you're scared of doing an exercise you've got less scared or you're feeling wobbly or any of those things that are uncomfortable discomforting sensations you are going to be reducing your capacity to produce central motor command as a result of feeling those things. So it's kind of almost a self-fulfilling prophecy I think in some ways. Coordination wise is it something that is you know does it help us to work up a series of loads to get to our particular weight? I think it probably does but again that's outside of my remit as well because you're now starting to go into motor learning territory and interestingly that body of literature is absolutely gigantic. So you know you'd want to ask somebody who specialised in motor learning and say to them look I'm trying to do a really complex difficult heavy high effort task does it help me to work up a series of steps to get to that load before actually doing the the test weight? If so why does that happen? And maybe they'd have an answer or maybe they wouldn't I don't know. I suspect they probably wouldn't. I don't think it's the kind of motor learning task that gets studied but yeah that would be definitely worth uh you know thinking.
Speaker 1I feel like it would be more likely the because I'm trying to trying to differentiate here is it load or is it the complexity of of the movement and the skill specificity and well I think you could test that
Speaker 2by just asking yourself how long does it take you to warm up for something like a leg press where you've got the ability yeah exactly compared with a squat. My experience is that it takes probably about five times as long to warm up for a squat than it does to warm up for a leg press. So I think it's the combination of the the load and the and the complexity and the difficulty of the movement. Incidentally I find it a lot faster to warm up for a deadlift than I do for a squat and I suspect that again is because the squat is just so much more capable of hurting you if it goes wrong. Maybe that's that's a bit of a kind of a generic statement but because people do get hurt doing deadlifts but you know the barbell is maybe maybe maybe that's not the right way to perceive it. Maybe it's the fact that when we do a squat we're balancing a barbell on our back and that is fundamentally perceived as more threatening by the by the brain you know even though maybe people would say oh no no people get damaged people get hurt doing deadlifts much more often they get hurt doing squats maybe that's true maybe that's true but the brain doesn't see it that way because you can just drop the barbell at any point as far as the brain is concerned you know that's that's an exit strategy whereas a squat you can't do that so maybe the brain perceives the squat as more terrifying I don't know I don't know.
Speaker 1You've talked about warming up the muscle that being muscle specific and talked about like aerobic exercise helping achieve that. Can one achieve that through doing like the actual exercises of the workout as opposed to doing aerobic exercise?
Speaker 2Well that that's not really a question because from a physiological point of view if you drop the weight lower than the threshold at which the muscle is hitting vascular occlusion you're doing aerobic exercise.
Speaker 1Yep okay so let's say I guess what I'm trying to get at here is if you look at a standard way people are warming up right I'd say most commonly people are probably going to do let's say two to three warm-up sets they'll probably do the first set with empty bar basically no load then they'll do a second set with maybe let's say what 50 percent of the working weight and then they might do a third set with I don't know 70 percent of the working weight and maybe they're doing eight repetitions each set there give or take right I look at that and I think well you probably haven't achieved the pap effect right you haven't probably done max effort.
Speaker 2Probably haven't achieved the muscle temperature effect either and this is a really interesting point because the reality is that most common approaches to warming up don't achieve anything no that's what it sounds like perhaps a feeling of what's the right word comfort with the exercise and actually I don't think that's unimportant you know that's what we were just talking about with the squad what we were just talking about with the squad it's like if you've got if you're uncomfortable because you've jumped too far up to the work weight then yes you're going to have worrying sensations that are going to you know kind of stop you from achieving high levels of recruitment so yes that's that's an issue. But fundamentally if we go back to the starting kind of physiological issues muscle temperature pap and pape no most warm-ups are not achieving any of those things.
Speaker 1Yeah so presumably they're just affecting perception of effort or that would be the main.
Speaker 2Just affecting comfort with the exercise that they're going to do and that degree of comfort as we've just been exploring is probably more related to the way in which the brain perceives the exercise you're doing like sort of knee extensions or leg curls or you know kind of something on a machine that's relatively stable you probably aren't going to be feeling particularly nervous about the exercise with your work weight at least not after you've done a couple of reps with a meaningful weight. So to
Speaker 1go back to muscle temperature then so how much exercise how much aerobic exercise must one do to achieve that muscle warming effect?
Speaker 2So you're looking at about 15 minutes really and it's as we've said it's muscle specific so you know realistically even when people do do their kind of treadmill walks before they do their exercise most people aren't getting anything for the upper body that's even remotely close to what they would need to achieve so you know i think in interestingly and again just to come back to something we talked about we're talking about this from an injury prevention point of view we're not really talking about needing to unless you're unless you're a kind of athlete competing in a fast movement sport you're not really going to need to do this for performance for sorry for stimuli related factors you're literally just talking about doing it from an injury prevention point of view but yeah most people who perhaps go in the gym to do a upper body workout or an exercise workout with upper body exercises in it are probably going to be not getting the injury prevention benefits of a warm-up from anything that they're doing now
Speaker 1a question i've thought about before and i don't know what i feel about this because i can see if you go either way would be what about a short sauna before a training session exactly i mean
Speaker 2that's that's going to get you the muscle temperature potentially i mean again this is not something i particularly love but i think it's going to get you the muscle temperature and i think it's going to get you the muscle temperature and i think it's going to get you looked at but you know if you look at the sauna literature and you discover that it does raise muscle temperature i guess it probably does then you know you could you could argue that that would be valid um i don't know how again i'm literally don't know what dosages and temperatures or anything would be relevant all i can do is point to the literature that i've looked at which is that warm baths do tend to have that effect so how long do they have
Speaker 1the bath for to have that
Speaker 2effect i would have to go and look i don't know um but i don't think it's ridiculous amount of
Speaker 1time so if someone was listening to this and they've been like oh man i've been doing their two to three sets of eight reps lightweight and sounds like i'm not doing a whole lot out of that if they wanted to level up their warm-up i guess we've covered a couple of things there you could do the the muscle temperature thing using a exercise that was hopefully doing that for the muscles you're going to use in that workout what are some other ways they could potentially level up their warm-up
Speaker 2so yeah leaving aside you know doing a muscle temperature warming um kind of practice and whether that's most likely on some kind of aerobic exercise that involves the muscles you're going to train with obviously you can keep the muscle warm after that by using tracksuit or something like that or you may be depending on what environment you're working out in um but leaving aside that it's really just the post-activation potentiation effect at the moment which is um you know essentially going to be generated by single max effort repetitions um so really what i would suggest is that once you've done your kind of sequence of set increments that you want to do to get you to your work weight you drop the weight down slightly and do a sort of single max effort repetition or a high effort repetition and that'll that'll basically do it in the context of barbell exercises i would not do that and the context of barbell exercises like bench press and squat and deadlift i would do a totally different exercise so i would do like a max effort vertical jump for the squat something like a medicine ball throw for the bench press and deadlift you might do a kettlebell swing or something like that so because there's just literally no point in starting to mess around with the barbell weight to do single effort repetitions in that situation it doesn't work so a bit for machines and other kind of exercises are much more controlled than you can do that single effort
Speaker 1something that what you've just said there that makes apparent is there's actually no necessity to do the actual exercise for your barbell weight so i would say that's something that you can do or your warm-up based on any of
Speaker 2these i mean of course all of this is muscle specific um you know the muscle temperature is muscle specific it's not exercise the pap and the paper effects are muscle specific they're localized effects got nothing to do with the brain really yeah so
Speaker 1except for that sort of confidence rehearsal thing we're talking about with the squat sure apart from that then you don't theoretically need to do that exercise for warming up no
Speaker 2which is one of those interesting points that you've raised in conversation with me before i'm going to steal your thunder shamelessly which is that if you do a sequence of different exercises for the same muscle and potentially warming up across those three different exercises is not necessary you could actually go from one to the other
Speaker 1yeah and that's a criticism i hear a lot in of full body plans where people will be like i couldn't possibly do that you need to warm up so much how could you do 20 different exercises you'll need to do 60 sets and like you've just said there well actually maybe one thing you could do if you're doing say two or three exercises per muscle is that first exercise and the way i would normally do it myself is i would do a couple of warm-up sets for that first exercise and generally i either don't need any for those late exercises or i will just do one with a light weight just make sure everything feels good and then go so it doesn't need to actually be more time consuming than if you were to do multiple sets of one exercise yeah absolutely
Speaker 2and i think i think really what's happened is that people have looked at things like squats where you need 25 minutes to warm up and you don't need to do 20 sets of one exercise and you don't need to do warm-up to your work weight if you're doing heavy load and they've kind of extrapolated that and so we need to do that same practice for biceps curls or you know kind of machine overhead presses and stuff like that and it's almost certainly not true part you know partly because as i've described we're not really getting any of the injury prevention mechanisms from the things that we're doing you know in the in the squat sort of warm-up those are confidence and movement related practice things that are essential but they're not actually doing the muscle strain injury prevention thing that you know we've been describing maybe you could argue that they are actually doing a very profound injury prevention thing because they're stopping you from hurting yourself by doing the exercise wrong in the work weight zone because you've you know worked your way up in the movement practice and and confidence to the point where you can do the way and i'm speaking from experience here and exactly what this feels like so um i think really it makes a lot of sense to essentially look at warm-ups through a slightly different lens rather than just saying you know when we're warming up for a squat we do it this way because that's essentially essential hang on a minute but those aren't really the ways in which you would reduce injury risk if you were starting from scratch and planning a warm-up with a machine exercise that is not requiring that steady progression of confidence and movement practice to get to the same place you know actually if i'm planning an overhead press in a machine i'm doing a seated overhead press in the machine um then what i really want to be doing is getting my arm muscles warm delts warm my back warm and then i want to be doing a pap effect and by doing that then i've potentially got a little bit more hyperspeed stimulus maybe don't know for sure and i've definitely got uh you know a perfect plus muscle temperature increase which is going to reduce my risk of a muscle strain injury if that would even really be a problem in that scenario is
Speaker 1something like an elliptical is that actually sufficient to warm up like the muscles in your arms and your back like is that
Speaker 2actually using your arms yes i mean if you're just kind of resting them on on the passively holding it yeah that's not going to work so you know you've got to be proactively thinking about what you're trying to get out of the the exercise um and again you know what we're really doing here is we're only really talking about muscle strain injury you know people could say well what about tendinopathy what about you know sort of articulation issues you know you could you could kind of say well what about them i mean until there's a literature base that can tell you how those mac how those injuries happen and how you can reduce the risk of them happening in a strength training context i don't really have any data to go with i mean it's i talk about muscle strain injury because that's that's what we've got data for can i ask how do you warm up in your workouts so um at my age now i don't have to do i don't really spend any time doing free weight exercises particularly so i'm basically going to be doing machine stuff and my approach is to i do a i do my aerobic exercise warm-up and then i do basically probably uh only two or three um sets of either singles or doubles with the machine i'm going to do for each machine and i i rush through them so i will sit let's describe the the seated overhead press because that's generally the thing that i kind of will start with because that's my weakest sort of lift so i will go to the machine i'll sit down and i will sit down and i will do my aerobic exercise and i'll immediately put it to about 50 of the weight i'm going to use approximately and i'll do one or two repetitions with that all i'm doing when i do that is just making sure that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with me that's appeared overnight since i last did the exercise now at my age that is a real possibility i could find i sit down the machine and something really just screams at me and it's because i've slept on the wrong side of the bed or you know i've just you know kind of done something that i shouldn't have done so um i do that's literally a test it's like does anything feel horrible and then i put the weight up again to usually about sort of 10 20 below what i'm planning to do as well and i do the same thing again i just test does it feel horrible does it feel okay um and if that feels okay i'll then uh usually uh move up to my work weight or relatively close to that and i'll do a single uh high effort repetition and then i'll wait a minute or so and then i'll do my work set and that's that's basically going to get i get there in about a um sort of single sets which is what i normally do again at my age i'm not trying to add any muscle particularly just trying to keep what i've got and i'll just go and move to a different machine do the same thing again um i do tend to always do that practice even though i might be doing multiple sort of overlapping muscle groups so i might go from i might do a row i might also do a pull down and do some rear delt stuff whatever i will always do that process because i'm actually doing the warm-up to test that my body isn't broken that's what i'm using the warm-up process for other people might use the process for different but that's what i'm doing yeah i'm just making sure nothing's going to go wrong
Speaker 1that's an interesting point what you just said there that other people might be using for other purposes because there are in fact other purposes you could use it for so one thing i do sometimes not all the time and sometimes is i use my warm-up for a stimulus actually i integrate like clusters into my warm-up so the first exercise i do of the day so i'll do maybe you know 10-15 minutes walking or whatever and then the first exercise i might do one or two kind of warm-up sets again just kind of feeling it out usually there's one set to be honest and then i go up to my five rep max and i'll just perform a number of singles with that and for me that'll be and i often for that exercise i won't even do more than just those singles i'll just do those singles and then i'm moving to the next exercise for that muscle and so that's achieved the pap effect for that following exercise so you know i guess i'm trying to get something slightly different out of it i do want to circle back around because i know people are asking this question you said you do your whole little sequence in only a minute or two so people will be asking how long do i need to rest between
Speaker 2warm-up sets it depends how many reps you're doing i mean i literally do one or two repetitions with each and i'm doing two or three sets with sequential weights and i don't feel any fatigue particularly when i'm doing that so i just bash straight through them because again the purpose of me doing them apart from the final pap rep the purpose of me doing them is testing that there's no problem and i've talked to a number of other elderly lifters i classify myself as an elderly lifter at this point that we kind of all say the same thing it's like you do not go jumping straight into i mean i couldn't do what you're describing for example where you might go from a row to a pull down or something like that and just bang straight into your work i just would never do that because i could literally find that my entire back just lights up like a christmas tree and when i when i pull i mean i just don't know that that's going to happen you know i've done i've in the last year i've done something like that twice in fact even with all the precautions i take you know i've been in a situation where i've pulled really i mean back is my problem because i spent so much time doing one arm chins and heavy weight to pull-ups that i think i got maybe a couple of issues as a result of doing that and now sometimes i can pull really really hard i mean i can max pull down machines out relatively easily and i and it just twinges and i just my whole back lights up and i'm walking around like quasimodo for the next couple of days and you know it just that's just what happens i think and so um i have to be super careful and i think a lot of us older lifters are we kind of just want to make sure that we haven't seized up overnight and created an issue that's going to come to light
Speaker 1halfway through a set so after that final one or two repetitions you do and and that's with a let's say like max effort that's achieving that pap effect even though they're only a single or double would you wait then before your working set how long would you wait for that so yeah
Speaker 2if i just go by feel so if if my if my my final pap rep is is like um with a sort of lower weight i mean i i'm not super specific about this and the reason i'm not super specific is because i so i don't take my training as seriously as people who are trying to achieve a particular you know kind of goal that they've got in mind i'm just trying to hang on to everything that i've got or as much of what i got as i can so i'm literally thinking about a maintenance program where i've got a high variety of exercises and i'm just trying to hit single sets with a high enough level of effort to keep what i've got there's no capacity for me to grow my age you know so i'm kind of looking at things from a different perspective also the gym is not my life you know i've got an entirely different life outside of the gym that is much more important to me so um you know that's just i will just go through and i'll do a final pap rep and if it doesn't feel fatiguing because it was maybe a little bit lighter then i'll just give it 30 seconds and i'll go into the work set if i've done a work repetition then maybe i'll leave it a little bit longer but i do get questions when people will say to me you know oh i'm doing this warm-up and they're describing they're doing like 10 reps with this weight and then they're waiting a couple of minutes then doing another 10 reps i'm like what are you even trying to achieve there's nothing in that uh physiological matrix that we work through that is this is stimulated by doing 10 reps with 50 of your work weight it does nothing it doesn't get you the temperature increase it doesn't get you the increase doesn't get you the paper increase what's it achieving it does nothing though i do think that the general approach to warm-ups is probably is probably quite uh quite wrong yeah i
Speaker 1think that's a good point i do think most of the warm-ups you look at they don't seem to be doing really anything and in fact you could argue based on what they are achieving you could just probably skip the warm-ups entirely like it doesn't it's
Speaker 2probably just creating fatigue that they've then got to sit and wait out before they can move to the next warm-up set and then sit and wait the fatigue from that and does it really actually enhance performance and do you think that's a good point i think it's a good point i think it's a good point i think it's a good point i think it's a good point performance or reduce injury risk it's not hitting any of the three bases that we've described so you know maybe it's not doing anything apart from that confidence thing again which is you know maybe not even that necessary if they're working with machine exercises i really
Speaker 1think that is so exercise specific i mean my obviously this is just end of one anecdote but i come from a background where warm-ups were emphasized we did a lot of warm-ups everything you would do you know you do three sets of warm-ups you do your eight to ten like you've just described and you know i was always taught like you have to do it and you have to do it and do this injury prevention you know cns priming all this stuff yeah and then only over the last couple of years have i started to kind of question do i need these warm-ups and over the last maybe two years i'm at a point now where i don't know at least 50 percent of the exercises i do i don't warm up at all and like you described there like the first exercise for that muscle i will and then often i won't really do anything and especially if it's a curl a machine exercise stuff that you know i squat or whatever i will but most machine exercise i mean leg extensions i still do because i don't hurt my knees but apart from that a leg curl i don't and i've been doing this for a while now and i don't feel any worse for it i haven't gotten injured i don't feel any body pains i don't feel like my performance has dropped by any means and it's it's just it's been like it's like dogma and it's like you have to do this it's like well hang on do you test it out and i'm not sure why we have to do this yeah
Speaker 2i mean i think the closest i get to not doing a warm-up is probably a rear delt fly what weight i use on the rear delt fly and the machine the gym that i go to and i will usually just go there and i'll do a single set of either one or two reps with about 80 percent of that weight and then i'll just literally move the selector to my work weight and i'll just go straight into my work set so i literally sit down bang i'll do two reps with a 80 percent and then i go straight into our work set and that's it that's the closest i get but that's because i've i've never had an issue with rear delt flies in any any point in my life it's it's it's this the it's the kind of the rows and the and the pull downs that scare me really that's the scenario where i've hurt myself in the past but yeah i think um what you're describing is is is very interesting i mean before this podcast i said to you one of the concerns i have about answering the question when people say to me what should i do as a warm-up i say well what i'm going to do is describe what i can't tell you what to do because the problem about warm-ups is that our community regards warm-ups as being integral to injury prevention so if i tell you to do something and then you get hurt then you can then come back and yell at me and tell me it's my fault i'm not going to tell you how to do that because i don't want to put myself in that situation having that responsibility so i can tell you what i do and if you you know find that useful that hopefully that is useful but ultimately i can't give you a another sort of a distinctive recipe to follow you can't tell you because that then puts me at risk of you blaming me for you getting hurt in the future so you said to me you didn't think that other people are that smart i
Speaker 1just said i don't think that people influencers think about the consequence of what they say necessarily which i interpreted as
Speaker 2you telling me
Speaker 1that you don't think that's that was that was yeah that was the interpretation um for what it's worth what i tell my groups to do as far as warm-ups is i say a this is super individual i say some people may feel like they don't need any and some people may feel like they need three or four or maybe even more if we're doing something like a squat and so i say ultimately it is up to you in general i recommend one to two and it would be one which would be very very light nothing on the bar just make sure everything works like your little test and then the second one would be to achieve that pap effect and so that could be a higher load or could be a max effort but i'm more than happy to say if you don't feel like you did any don't do any so i do think there's individualization there and i don't think we need to be so prescriptive as to say everyone must do four warm-up sets or whatever um yeah obviously it depends what you're trying to achieve as
Speaker 2well yeah i think really the important factor i think that's come out of this kind of conversation is that the kind of the very mainstream approach to warming up which is where you you know you do like 10 reps with a lightweight and then 10 reps with a slightly or eight reps with a slightly light heavier weight and then five and then three and then two and you work your way up in a pyramid form to your work weight that really does nothing really physiologically sort of valid there's no physiological mechanism to explain what that is doing you know even if you want to go down the route to saying well okay well how do i how am i supposed to warm up for a back squat exercise well even then yes you would work up through a series of weights but you don't need to do 10 repetitions at any point you know you're talking two or three repetitions with each of your increments you know there's no sense in doing 10 there's no scenario in which to do 10 repetitions at any point you know you're talking two or three 10 is a good idea from the mechanisms that we described you know we want muscle temperature increases well that's going to be about your aerobic warm-up it's not going to be or or whatever else you do it's not going to be about the exercise specific one pap and pape both of those are going to be about the final thing you do just before you do your work set everything up to that point the only reason you do it is confidence and make in my case at my age making sure everything still works confidence and movement practice um as you pointed out if you're dealing with machine exercises where you don't need any real confidence booster or movement practice you can jump really quickly through those as i've described i jump really quickly through my rear delt fly because it just feels so ridiculously easy to kind of do the movement and i don't feel i need any kind of confidence because i feel like the exercises would have been safe for me um so yeah i think individuality is that is that kind of confidence and movement practice side the other stuff is actually got nothing to do with the exercise specific warm-up
Speaker 1at all i don't want to beat this topic to death but i do have one final question for you and then we'll wrap up over warm-ups what's happening there is anything different that we should talk about there
Speaker 2so this is one of those things where again i just have to say there could be something really interesting here or there could be nothing here what is probably happening with an over warm-up is where we use a heavier than your weight the work than we're going to use for the for the work set is is almost certainly just a change in the way the brain perceives the effort required to do the movement if that is the case then what you're going to get is an improvement which is fantastic but i don't know whether that is the case you know so somebody needs to go and do a test to see if performance is increased by doing a single heavier load but they need to use a control group that isn't just no over warm-up they need to do a single max effort rep with the same weight or a lighter weight to create a pep effect as well so you need to it needs to control for the pep effect so what you need to do if you want to construct an over warm-up is to test this yourself i mean there's no reason why you can't test this yourself you would do a you would fix your rest period between the what we call conditioning contraction and the main set so you would say i'm going to do a single repetition either with you know my work weight plus 10 or i'm going to do a single repetition with my work weight minus 10 both with maximal efforts and then i'm going to wait three minutes or two minutes better probably two minutes and i'm going to do my work set if the over warm-up is beneficial for reasons additional to the pep then you will get a superior effect on your work set if it is basically just a pep then you'll get the same effect as the control group which used your work weight minus 10 instead of your work plus 10 i just wrote a study design for somebody if they're interested in testing that but that would be and the thing is some people report that it does seem to have a beneficial effect i played around with it about six months to a year ago and i initially i thought it might help and then i realized it would help and then i realized it would help and then i realized it wasn't really um having a beneficial effect for me but other people's mileage may vary um until somebody goes and does some work on it i don't think we're going to know whether it on average works for most people most of the time or if it just doesn't really work for most people my two
Speaker 1cents would be for most people who are trying to do the over warm-up it's probably meaning that they are getting that pep effect and most likely their normal warm-up is not achieving that pep
Speaker 2effect yeah exactly yeah i think you're probably right there um i suspect that it's it's just creating a pep effect where i'm not doing that pep effect and i'm not doing that pep effect where one wasn't there previously so but yeah uh as i say in the event that it does create an effect it's almost certainly going to be this uh change in the perception of the load and the heaviness of the load which therefore makes it feel easier and therefore you can then push your effort perception to your normal maximum level and actually now you're coinciding with a high level of whether that happens is entirely speculative i do not know that's it that's our warm-up episode done thank you guys for joining us hopefully you'll join us again next week week.
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