Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Malseri and we're going to talk about warm-ups today. So there's a lot to get through. We're just kind of working through the various points that we're going to tackle today and there's an enormous amount of material so I'm going to kind of crack on and get straight into it. Basically, there is a lot of confusion at the moment about warm-ups and some of that confusion stems from the terminology, talking about warming up, and some of that confusion stems from the fact that some people are talking about their perspective on specific situations, for example powerlifting, other people are talking from a different perspective, for example machine-based bodybuilding, and that actually creates a bit of a difficulty in terms of understanding what is being said and why it's being said and what's actually being talked about. So what we're going to do is we're going to unpack all of this in a series of points. We're going to tackle each one by one. So starting at the very beginning, when I say we've got a terminology problem, we've got a terminology problem because when exercise scientists talk about warming up, they tend to think about actually temperature-based warm-ups, thinking about warming the muscle up in terms of taking the temperature from one place to another place. The problem is that when the fitness industry talked about warming up, they referred to the thing that warms you up, the thing that warms you up, the thing that we conventionally call warm-up sets. And the problem is that a warm-up set doing a set of, say, 10 repetitions with a lighter load before you do your work set or multiple sets of 10 repetitions or whatever number you kind of think of as appropriate for warm-up sets, it doesn't really matter, doing those what we call warm-up sets are not actually warming the muscle up in temperature terms. So we actually have a problem in the terminology. And I've talked about this concept that Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, Scott Adams used to call this word thinking. He used to say that there is a problem that is almost like a magical spell, that when someone refers to a thing with a particular label, some people, word thinkers he called them, jump straight from the label to the assumption the underlying concept is actually being correctly described by that label. So we say, "Oh, this is a warm-up set." And word thinkers immediately go, "Oh, this is a warm-up set." And word thinkers immediately go, "Oh, this is a warm-up set." And word thinkers immediately go, "Oh, this is a warm-up set." And word thinkers immediately go, "Oh, this is a warm-up set." Oh, that means it's warming up the muscle because you just said it's a warm-up set, so it must do that thing. I'm like, well, no. If you actually kind of go and do the kind of work and unpick what's going on there, you'll figure out that they're not actually warming the muscle up at all. The temperature isn't changing. If you want to change the temperature of a muscle, you have to do 15, 20 minutes of low-intensity cardio with that muscle. So again, there's a problem there. We'll get onto that in a minute. But yeah, basically, we have a problem in the fitness industry insofar as we have a label that is being applied to a thing, a particular practice, which is warm-up sets, and they're not actually changing the temperature of the muscle at all. So that's the kind of the first thing that we need to kind of wrestle with. So when we say warm-up sets, we should really be calling them preparatory sets or preparatory repetitions or however it is that you want to kind of describe them. But the reality is, the terminology is what it is and we're kind of stuck with it. So it's kind of like metabolic stress is not actually a stress, but, you know, kind of it's metabolite accumulation, same kind of idea. Kind of call a thing a thing and suddenly it acquires power. But anyway, so we've got this kind of warm-up kind of concept. Okay, so what we're going to do then is we're going to start now tackling this idea of, well, okay, so if I want to warm up a muscle, can I do that? Can I change the temperature of that muscle and does that change anything? Well, yes, it does. So if you change the temperature of a muscle, and you can do that in multiple ways, we'll kind of go through a few suggestions practically in a moment. But if you change the temperature of a muscle, you can actually produce an improvement in the ability of those muscle fibers to produce force instantaneously. Now, that probably doesn't change the number of repetitions you can actually do. It probably mainly just changes the instantaneous kind of force and velocity. So from the point of view of adaptions, it's probably going to be more beneficial from a velocity point of view. I think there's definitely value in terms of if you're looking to stimulate high velocity related adaptions, I think that an increase in temperature is probably a good idea. And that has some really interesting implications for what we're going to talk about in a moment, but ultimately probably isn't going to affect bodybuilding that much. Also, on the flip side, it probably helps to improve the, reduce the risk of muscle strain injury, again, by increasing the capacity, the muscle fibers to produce force, in this case, obviously in eccentric phases, rather than concentric, which is the kind of velocity related concern. So from an athletic point of view, I actually think there's a lot more value in increasing the temperature of a muscle before we do an exercise session, much, much less interesting from a bodybuilding point of view, where the risk of a muscle strain injury is lower, anabolic aside, the risk of a muscle strain injury is lower and the kind of concerns about producing force are lower. So from an athletic point of view, I actually think there's a lot more value in increasing the temperature of a muscle before we do an exercise session, much, much less interesting from a bodybuilding point of view, where the risk of a muscle strain injury is lower, anabolic aside, the risk of a muscle strain injury is lower, and the kind of concerns about producing force is lower. So from an athletic point of view, I actually think there's a lot more value in increasing the temperature of a muscle strain injury, much, much less interesting from a bodybuilding point of view, where the risk of a muscle strain injury is lower, anabolic aside, the risk of a muscle strain injury is lower, and the kind of concerns about producing force is lower, and the kind of concerns about producing force is lower, and the kind of concerns about producing adaptions related to kind of high velocity stuff are relatively unimportant. So I do think temperature has a big role to play for athletic warmth. So let's talk about some practical issues. So Rob, you've told the story before, but tell us again how you personally do your own temperature-based warm-ups for your strength training sessions.
Speaker 2Yeah, so my own personal one is I just hop in an extremely, I just hop in an extremely, hot shower for 15 to 20 minutes, and I just, you know, blast the water and just stand there, trying not to move, and just roast for the whole time. And it tends to work really well. I feel great afterwards, and, you know, I do suggest it to people if they have the option. It's super easy. It looks a little weird showering before you train, and then possibly after.
Speaker 1Well, hopefully there's not like a crowd of people watching you, but yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, but it definitely works. And then, you know, in the gym for clients, I think the easiest one when you're like actually in a gym setting is just like an elliptical or a salt bike, anything like that that uses all four limbs. So like you said, you got to actually use the muscle that you're trying to increase the temperature in. So if you want to increase the temperature in, you know, your upper body muscles for throwing and things like that, and you do something like a jog or just something that uses your legs, you're not actually going to get the effect. And the same thing would be, you know, in the opposite direction. If somehow you use something like one of those weird bikes that just uses your arms to get the effect in your legs, it's not going to work. So you just need something with all four limbs at the same time.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's really important. It's a muscle temperature phenomenon. I mean, we've got data showing that, you know, you can sit in a warm bath and it'll have that kind of effect. And data showing that you do kind of 15, 20 minutes of cardio with the muscle and it'll have a temperature-based, you know, effect, which is, so we know these things work. The thing is, you're not going to get the effect. You're not going to get that effect from just doing kind of some strength training kind of preparatory sets. It doesn't work like that. And that's a problem that we've got, unfortunately, in the industry at the moment. Okay, so yeah, so basically, there's no reason why the, you know, the hot shower, the hot bath kind of situation will not work. I mean, it absolutely will. The interesting problem we have with the cardio side of things is if people push that too far, then you start to get, you know, a fatiguing effect. And then we've got this problem, especially with high velocity adaptions, that the adaptions are not going to happen. So I actually think that there's a lot of justification for the hot water rather than the kind of the cardio. Obviously not going to be feasible for everybody. I think it's really, really, it's not just like an alternative. I actually think it probably is better.
Speaker 2Yeah, I would think so. And I like it better.
Speaker 1Well, there you go. So before we jump to the podcast, you're asking some, some sort of about some other specific questions that people have asked in this particular regard. Do you want to kind of run through that again for people who are listening?
Speaker 2Yeah, I've had people message before asking, because we have talked about warmups at least a little bit. And I know on social media and that I have. So people have asked what I would recommend for warmups, you know, for someone like right before their actual athletic event, when they're not in a gym and obviously don't have access to, you know, like an elliptical and a softball. Like I know that it just, you know, there's kind of out on a field or something like that. Um, so yeah, we had talked a little bit for the podcast and normally, you know, most people would probably have access, like you were saying to a changing room. So then they can just take advantage of the hot shower and then throw some, you know, a sweatsuit tracksuit on afterwards to try to maintain the temperature increase.
Speaker 1Totally. Absolutely. That's where I would start. I would say get warm in the changing room and then pack. And if you're waiting around before you're going to have your, you know, kind of training session or competition or whatever it is that you're doing, make sure you keep those layers on. And, and you can even get little kind of warming pads. Um, it's a number of different technologies and you can just put those in your pockets and, you know, kind of keep them available, um, for making sure you stay warm. I'm not suggesting that you make yourself uncomfortably hot, but just making sure that you don't kind of, uh, you know, kind of lose. That muscle temperature benefit that you gain in the changing room, um, if you're in a scenario where, I mean, like I was just kind of describing some situations that I've been in. the past where there's literally no kind of hot water no kind of anything and you're literally stuck with what you've got you know kind of around you then you probably are going to need to keep the sweats on and and kind of walk briskly around if you've got the access to the kind of warming kind of pads or something like that you can keep those in your pockets and just try and do something physical that will increase your body temperature um your muscle temperature in a way that doesn't also create fatigue and discomfort or anything like that so I think that's probably a little bit of an obscure scenario I don't think most people are going to find themselves in those scenarios most people are going to have a changing room they can get warm in and then put the sweats on and go outside I think that's probably the kind of the the best way of doing it but what I don't think is a great idea is this kind of traditional S&C way of kind of approaching the problem where you get people to run around the field for kind of 20 minutes before they start the training session I'm like honestly you are just destroying your chances of any kind of high velocity adaptions at that point uh it's really really not a good idea yeah back in the day
Speaker 2um in gymnastics training every once in a while on a Saturday practice they'd have us do like a one or two mile run uh around just out on the pavement around the gym being there done that
Speaker 1got the t-shirt it's so silly you're basically just guaranteeing you're not going I mean okay for gymnastics maybe high velocity isn't necessarily always key to many of the skills that you're practicing um but yeah I mean for for a lot of athletics and all that kind of stuff you are going to need to move fast you need to practice the ability to move fast and long slow cardio warm-ups are not helping that happening so I think much better is to kind of take the temperature-based uh route using uh hot water sweat clothing and that kind of thing cool again without making people miserable I mean like I once I was once I was once chatting with an S&C coach and they've had recommendations for people getting you know really really uncomfortable levels of of kind of uh of of of of of heating with you know sort of the the warming pads and excessive amounts of sweat clothing I'm like come on there's a there's a there's a limit here let's let's be sensible but you know in principle the concept is is valid it's just you know you can push things too far as with anything cool okay so that's the kind of the the most important thing really for us to kind of grapple with regarding warm-ups uh the terminology and actually um you know improving the muscle temperature and that is going to benefit certain adaptions as I say including the high velocity ones which um you know you need a high velocity to achieve um you know potentially a couple of other ones as well and also reduce the risk of a muscle strain injury um a lot of people have started to provide additional justifications for why they're doing warm-up sets so we're now going to move away from the actual kind of temperature warming uh kind of concept and talk about some of the other reasons why a warm-up set or some kind of warm-up might be um useful and again I'm now using terminology in a more conventional way rather than the temperature based way and potentiation comes up a lot so potentiation there's a number of different potentiation mechanisms I tend to focus on the post-activation potentiation mechanism because I think that's the most relevant it does something very very similar to an increase in temperature it instantaneously improves muscle fiber force there is no potentiation that increases um motor unit recruitment um I see this a lot um Rob sends me videos all the time of people claiming that you can increase motor unit recruitment by some kind of potentiation or uh kind of some other uh drill or whatever uh that is being done prior to a strength training set it's not possible every single exercise um bout that we do reduces um motor unit recruitment through the supraspinal central nervous system or spinal central nervous system um um fatigue mechanisms so yes you will find people confidently stating that you can increase recruitment with um a potentiation technique you can't it doesn't work like that um but you can increase instantaneous muscle fiber force and that probably does have benefits for um things like high velocity adaptions and maybe some kind of strength related adaptions so is it worth doing um yes and no okay so here's the problem again um the problem is that because it's a muscle fiber specific phenomenon it's a muscle fiber specific phenomenon so it also doesn't last very long so you kind of got to chase it for the um in the moment before you do the uh kind of work set that you're going to do and you've got to do it for this specific muscle that you're training so it really is one of those things like if somebody says I'm going to do a warm-up prior to my strength training workout because I want to achieve potentiation I'm like you haven't read the literature you don't know what you're talking about ultimately it has to be done immediately prior to the um kind of actual strength training set you're doing so you want to get a potential effect for a particular muscle you've got to create that effect uh maybe 30 to kind of 60 seconds before you actually do the lift that you're going to do it's not a warm-up in the sense that you can stick it on the beginning of a strength training workout you've kind of got to stick it on the beginning of or just before you do the actual work set that you're going to do but on the plus side and this is why I was kind of prevaricating a little bit uh on the plus side it's actually really easy to do you can literally do it with a single repetition and as long as you've got a high effort and you've activated the fibers you will actually produce the effect because all you're really doing is signaling for the myosin heads to move very very slightly closer to actin and they'll do that in response to being activated um relatively quickly so you can get it pretty much instantaneously from a preparatory repetition okay so in the term in in the kind of the context of the workouts that you're writing Rob are you ever tending to include something like this as a matter of course or is it just in relatively rare scenarios where you kind of got long rests between sets where you know that you've got no kind of um potentiated effects carried over from what you've just done yeah the most the most
Speaker 2common one that I'll do myself and then I'll have clients too is like before a squat you know like you said like 30 to 60 seconds ish out from the squat just doing a max effort vertical jump before as for bench press real very fast med ball throw and then you know you just use those light load fast movements since there's not really going to be any fatigue because you always want to balance the fatiguing aspect of the rep um because a lot of people ask me about doing you know heavy singles like like a classic over warm-up and stuff like that um and you know they'll even report that they feel better they feel stronger on the back offset afterwards and that's fine you know I think they assume it's because of potentiation but you know it's likely not if they've done it a few minutes out um you know mentally maybe the set just feels a little lighter too afterwards whatever it may be but to get the actual potentiation benefit generally just using like I said like a some kind of jump some kind of throw in the 30
Speaker 1seconds or a minute prior yeah and I think I think that kind of um it bears repeating that we're probably not getting an enormous amount of benefit with bodybuilding scenarios um I mean there might be a little bit of a an additional hypertrophy stimulus going on for the additional mechanical tension I don't think it's probably that meaningful I think it's more relevant from the um kind of strength related side of things um or the velocity related side of things so in an athletic workout um I can see the value being there I'm not probably going to program it in the hypertrophy section of workout or uh for bodybuilding in general I don't know how you feel about that yeah I'm none of the
Speaker 2athletes I've worked with I haven't done it with any of them so
Speaker 1and then athletic stuff totally I think doing it prior to I mean the thing is just to kind of clarify for people uh listening if we are doing a high velocity section of the high performance physiology uh kind of workout plan so we do high velocity followed by heavy strength training followed by plyometrics followed by super maximal isometrics can slot in before or after the heavy strength training section depending on what you were doing them for um generally speaking in the high velocity section we're doing probably three to five single repetitions with rest in order to try and reach a maximal velocity that is creating a potentiation effect for you it's built into the recipe it's doing it automatically so I do the first repetition uh the high uh the jump for example and then I wait 30 seconds I do another jump I've just got my potentiation effect from the first jump on the second jump that's one of the reasons why you will hit higher velocities um on the later repetitions rather on the very first one almost nobody is going to max out their vertical jump height on the first attempt it's just not going to happen most people only hit it on two three four I actually tend to tell more like four or five but that's just kind of me so um so yeah so the the potentiation effect is built into high velocity uh kind of situations a lot of the time if we're doing kind of preparatory reps for a squat and we'll get more into this later on or squat or deadlift we're probably going to be getting the same kind of effect as long as we're not getting too fatigued by doing loads of reps inverted commas warm-up sets preparatory sets um but again as you say if we're doing multiple sets we don't want to be doing that don't be kind of re-racking and de-racking the bar um but yeah we can just do it with a max effort vertical jump do exactly the same thing so yeah really cool
Speaker 2yeah I think like you said and probably worth mentioning if you were to just be increasing recruitment every time you did something that was offering potentiation like that would be an adaption I think you've said that before like
Speaker 1there's some amazing studies one of my favorite studies shows that you can take untrained people and you can put them through a series of uh kind of max effort isometrics with rest between them and they will literally increase recruitment and it's like and people look at that go wow no that's potentiation i'm like no it's not it's an adaption because it doesn't go back it's it's permanent yeah it's not a temporary thing absolutely mad yeah you can't really you can't really conceptually increase uh recruitment as a temporary phenomenon i mean you can with motivation and that's kind of where we're going to go next so is there anything else you wanted to say on um potentiation before we move on no i think that pretty much covered it yeah and we've done a whole episode on potentiation so if people are interested in kind of going through this in more detail then please do scroll back and you'll find an entire kind of 30 40 minutes um going through all the various different types of potentiation i've just kind of covered the one that i think is most relevant here so okay so yeah um psychological stuff so um psychological stuff is often brought up as a uh important feature warm-ups so again um because we've got this weird scenario where we've got this word or phrase warm-up and we know that it doesn't really actually warm up the muscle temperature wise you know people are kind of like trying to find reasons why they want to do the warm-up and it's like okay well so now one of the things that's being referred to is the psychological side of you know like is a warm-up serving as a psychologically beneficial um intervention well there's no data that's just it can there's no data that we've got that says you know um doing a warm-up um can have a positive psychological effect and that will then enhance your strength training performance what we do have is a whole load of motivational interventions so like if you've got people giving you verbal encouragement you know if you've got other people in the gym that are you know kind of working out the same time as you if you've got a little bit of competitive rivalry with some gym partner that you're trying to kind of um that you're that you regularly go to the gym with and they're kind of lifts and some lifts are better than yours and other lifts you're better than theirs and you know you can have that bit of rivalry you know those scenarios are very very motivating and they will increase motine recruitment because they will increase the maximum level of effort that you are prepared to tolerate um so ultimately um we do have some good data suggesting that psychological factors can influence positively a workout because you can increase recruitment not like potentiation we can't but uh these factors can um does a woman do that um not that we've got any data to suggest um so no we don't have any data to suggest that happens um you know i mean unlike this there's bits and pieces of other things as well like um you know autonomy uh support giving people some choices in the workout plan that they're doing that can also have a positive effect on motivation um again nothing really related to um kind of warming up um i'm going to steal something that you told me before the podcast and bring it in and hand over to you it's just a little bit rude but um you mentioned the idea of kind of putting your phone down and i mean that's i think that's really really important because um but what that's actually doing is removing a negative it's not introducing a positive so the problem with like work uh related thoughts so if you're coming into the gym with a head full of uh work related thoughts or you kind of uh answering emails or you literally just scrolling social media or whatever it may be you've got there is a whole load of cognitive processes that are creating um cognitive fatigue and that's a real thing actually is a real thing uh it basically produces super spinal central nervous system fatigue and reduces the amount of effort you're prepared to tolerate uh for the central motor command because you've got other stuff that you're already tolerating you're already tolerating the discomfort of thinking about work thinking about you know these people on social media who say rubbish and all that kind of thing i bet that's your problem you're too busy worrying about the silly things that other people are saying on social media um but yeah so um that genuinely will have a negative impact and putting the phone away and getting your head out of workspace and if you personally feel like you know spending 20 minutes staring out the window while you know doing cross trainer is helpful for that then okay but there's no data to suggest that it is um but if it's more likely to be the the not thinking about work and putting the phone down that's having a positive impact is there anything that you uh kind of do specific i mean okay let me just rewind a little bit uh because i did mention a whole load of psychological stuff so when you're working with clients do you have any kind of set protocols for introducing some of this motivational stuff i mean the things that i typically do is
Speaker 2just giving someone like you said autonomy like i try to give someone a little bit of their own choice when it comes to like warm you know preparatory sets and things like that i was going to say warm-up sets a habit um try to give them some kind of like a rep target um try to maybe give them some like feedback on bar speed show them footage things like that um you know all those things just get a little bit better performance and then myself uh the phone thing i mentioned that because like i've been trying to be better about it lately because i will get sucked into something and then between sets of a bench press i'm looking at social media or answering a client things like that and i'm trying very hard to get them to be better about it and i'm trying to get them to be better about it and i'm trying very hard lately to just put the phone to the side and um you know actually like you said just remove the negative rather than like you know it's not doing anything in terms of increasing performance um but yeah so those are those are kind of my biggest ones
Speaker 1yeah totally i mean interestingly the phone is kind of like a double-edged sword because on the one hand we do have data showing that watching a exciting training montage of of you know people that you respect and and kind of want to emulate is really positive and i think that's a really good you know if you've got a bunch of athletes doing a workout and you're watching the video of them doing that workout you're going to be more motivated to then go in and give it your best in your uh your workout um but of course the problem is that the phone also brings all these kind of negative things as well so if there's a kind of if you've got the kind of the technological um sort of capacity or interest to lock down certain apps and just only have access to other you know kind of um say uh training montages and or you know motivational music then that's probably a valuable tool to have but on the other hand if you don't have that discipline or technological prowess then probably best just kind of locking the phone away for the for the duration of the workout but the point i'm making here is that there's no special reason why a warm-up is able to do that of any description whether it's a warm-up in the temperature based sense of you know a shower or a sort of um uh kind of cardio session or whether it's a warm-up in the kind of label sense of um you know preparatory strength training sets there's no reason why that can have these positive motivational effects um in the way that motivational techniques that have been studied can do uh like verbal encouragement and working in a gym or watching yep sorry uh working with a gym partner in a gym or you know watching a training montage those have got really nice data behind them uh warm-up doesn't have that data cool okay so we've tackled some of the really easy things whilst i think these are relatively easy to kind of uh kind of get heads around let's now move on to a couple of things uh that are a little bit more kind of um provocative because um one of the things that people discuss using preparatory warm-up sets preparatory sets warm-up sets for is practicing the lift i know and you're rolling your eyes at me because you're like why would anybody say that so let me just give the kind of the background people may not have done the reading in the motor learning literature motor learning literature is relatively clear that um the improvements in coordination are extremely specific to the task that you're doing um and we've got some corroboration of that in the strength training literature and the athletic performance literature which shows that if you do squats if you improve your leg strength from squats you aren't going to then improve your coordination in a vertical jump even though fundamentally uh the joint segments are doing the same thing you've just got different kind of contributions of um the hip and the knee uh and the velocity just kind of changes the way that the brain is actually governing that particular movement so um ultimately going from sort of a light weight especially with low effort level uh to a heavy weight with a high effort level you are actually using very very different coordination uh kind of motor programs so practicing a lift so for example if i do if i'm going to do my my heavy squats and i'm going i'm going to practice my form with a light weight um no you're not um you are literally just kind of trying to copy what you're doing with the heavy weight and it's not actually going to transfer at
Speaker 2all you aren't going to change anything yeah i mean if that was the case you could just to improve your 500 pound squat you could do uh 200 pound squat and just do a bunch of just a whole load
Speaker 1of them and your coordination would magically improve in the 500 pound squat it's not going to happen because they're not the same there um you know and i think and and again that's that's kind of the short answer and i know that that's going to be a little bit provocative to some people but fundamentally that is just what the motor learning literature says you can't really practice coordination or improve coordination by by kind of cheating and and doing a a lift that's not the lift it doesn't really work like that um also i guess there's this bodybuilding tendency and this is kind of a personal peeve of mine but there's and we kind of mentioned this before the podcast and i said i'm going to rant about this because it really annoys me um basically there is a i think there's a trend amongst influencers in the bodybuilding space to over claim what form can do for you so there's this tendency yeah so there's this tendency for people to kind of um show videos of themselves doing a um an exercise in a very very particular way and they'll kind of show you that you know your arm has to be in this position your kind of fingers have to be pointing in this direction or if you're talking about curls or whatever or in a squat or a kind of a similar type exercise you know your your kind of body has to be in this position reality is most people's kind of uh sort of general frame isn't going to permit them to do exactly the same kind of movement pattern as somebody else's frame it just we're all different we all have different kind of um segment lengths and that kind of thing and it's not going to look exactly the same so it's a little bit of a misleading way to start with anyway to suggest that everybody can squat the same way everybody can bench press the same way everybody can deadlift the same way it's just not going to look identical it just isn't um but also what doing a movement in particular way can do for you in terms of the actual kind of adaptions you're going to achieve is is very much um kind of unsupported by evidence shall we say there's no reason to suppose that if you do a um kind of exercise in a very very particular way with a very very particular form that you can magically create a superior adaption internal focuses of attention um can increase the level of motor increment you're getting um for a specific muscle group because you're reducing the amount of motor recruitment that's being displayed elsewhere if you start going down that route you are going to have some serious disadvantages because you're going to lose the ability to uh you know track progressive overload meaningfully over time um but ultimately you know let's be clear that yes if you are focusing on forming an order in order to um squeeze a particular muscle more then yes you are going to get a slightly higher level of recruitment form isn't doing that the internal focus is doing that so but yeah i do think that people are over claiming what form is doing for you and i personally think that's because they are looking for a reason to explain why they or somebody else is really really big and you're not and i think that's really really disingenuous that's why i don't like it it's because they're trying to find some kind of magic secret source that they can point at and of course we know what the secret source is and it's not form it's source it's like let's be clear that the industry is definitely broken in this regard and people are running around it when i i remember i remember when i kind of first started getting interested in the fitness industry um i remember people running around saying oh it's this particular supplement or it's this particular protein powder and if you don't take that you won't get big like these professional bodybuilders i'm like it's got nothing to do with protein powder absolutely nothing you know and i think there's a tendency for people to keep looking for these magical things and form at the moment i think is one of those things people are going oh the reason you're not gigantic is because your form is wrong it's like no it's not yeah they have all these like
Speaker 2really really complicated exercises and setups and yeah you know they they have this idea that if you're you know a millimeter off you're going to be doing something entirely different when really like you know unless the form is so drastically different that it's targeting like a different region of a muscle or a different muscle it's really not going to be doing anything too significant and i certainly don't get caught up in those little details and people have actually asked me why i don't um you know i've gotten messages about why i don't keep people's form incredibly strict and tempo incredibly strict and all these things and i'm like because it doesn't
Speaker 1matter tempo is another perfect example that would be another example of where people are trying to find a secret source that doesn't exist you know or you've sent me so many videos of people recommending like 10 seconds of eccentric tempos or eight seconds or even changing them like six seconds this week eight seconds next week and 10 seconds the week after and it's all kind of like trying to give people a reason why they're not gigantic and somebody else is it's like the this is not helping the tempo form two very very similar problems i think but again one of the
Speaker 2things they mentioned with tempo is like you know people will argue that slowing it down and all these things and controlling the reversal and reps all that stuff will you know allow you to use the muscle better and all these kinds of things and yeah like you said that's the magical reason for your growth um that if you just kind of use less of the you know they always say most people just say stretch reflex that you know i've heard people argue if you use less of the stretch reflex your muscle will work harder and that will make you grow more and all these kinds of things
Speaker 1no you just go slower yeah you just go slow but no i mean like with specifically with the form thing because that's the context of this conversation the warm-up and i think that's the context of the conversation and i think that's the idea of being a place where you can practice your form and practice your technique is somehow that is going to have some magical benefit for you in the future i think ultimately if you're a bodybuilder and you're choosing exercises that require a lot of effort and concentration on your form then you have ultimately introduced a flaw in your reasoning because you shouldn't have had those exercises in your program to begin with you know you should not be choosing exercises that are complicated and difficult to coordinate because that will reduce recruitment you're creating a barrier where one should not exist i mean that's the whole reason we've got all these kind of machines available to us now with bodybuilding is because we don't want to do that but that's a separate issue and you can use that in the context of athletic training workouts you don't have to use free weights for everything just because you're training to be an athlete you can use machines for many exercises if the purpose of those if you're if you're trying to achieve adaptions that are not coordination related yeah so anyway so that was very very ranty so um if people are kind of turned off by that i apologize but i needed to get that out of my system so um so moving on then to um what i think is going to be the most provocative and difficult um kind of section of all what about doing preparatory repetitions in order to ensure that we can accomplish the work set safely in scenarios where that work set might not be safe otherwise i think this is the really really interesting part because i think honestly this is the this is the reason why most people get very emotional about the warm-ups debate so and this is what i meant when i said at the very beginning that you've got maybe got powerlifters um trying to talk to bodybuilders um and just being unable to have a conversation about what warm-up sets are actually doing and i think this is the reason why most people get very emotional about the warm-up set because the bodybuilder might have done a whole bunch of other kind of different exercises first and they come on to their leg curl exercise that they're going to do and they've already done a whole lot of the stuff they're physically warm they're kind of they know that their body is functioning and not going to fall apart they do a couple of reps on the leg curl they go yeah yeah i'm good and they go straight into a work set and you literally take that out of context and go you know the bodybuilder is sort of describing what they're doing to a powerlifter and they say oh yeah i know i just did a warm-up set and they go yeah yeah i'm good and they go you know kind of one rep with a kind of relatively moderate load and i was happy that i you know kind of was going to be okay and i went straight in and did my work set which and then you know they don't disclose the fact that that was like a 10 rep max or 12 reps whatever and the the kind of powerlifter is kind of pulling his oh he probably doesn't have any hair because he's probably like me he's probably bald but uh the powerlifter is kind of like going what on earth are you talking about there's no physical way on the planet that you can do you know kind of just one one rep a addition of a moderate load and then go straight into your warm-up set you will literally explode your your kind of your joints will just kind of immediately stop functioning and you'll never be able to lift weights ever again you know this is impossible and it's because the powerlifter is thinking to themselves okay how do i warm up okay well i i kind of walk into sort of the uh the squat rack and i i make sure that um i'm in the right place i've got all the the bar at the right height and maybe do a rep or two with the with the bar and then i start adding plates and i gradually walk myself through the bar and i start adding plates and i gradually walk myself through the to the point where i'm you know kind of around about my my kind of work set weight um and then i'll psych myself up and i'll do i'll do a proper work set and that maybe takes me 20 minutes um it used to take me 20 minutes but maybe it takes you 10 minutes but whatever um but yeah so i think that's the reason i think that's i think this is the reason why we have a problem talking about warm-up sets because um the people who are using free weights and thinking in powerlifting terms and thinking about compound lifts and bench presses and squats and deadlifts and that kind of thing are going to take 15 minutes getting to the point where they're happy to do a work set whereas the bodybuilder who is using machines and doing high repetitions and not doing anything complicated is not going to have those limitations i mean is this making sense to you rob yeah yeah and i mean
Speaker 2like yeah do you think of someone someone incredibly strong you know what's the current raw world record in the squat 1080 i think or 1050 if you were to tell someone to just throw a thousand pounds on the bar and you were to tell someone to just throw a thousand pounds on the bar and you were to tell someone to just throw a thousand pounds on the bar and you were to tell obviously they would look at you like you were out of your mind like you're never going to get to those huge huge weights without ramping up a bit first you know squatting deadlifting you want to make sure obviously you're not practicing and improving coordination but you want to make sure your technique is the way you want it to be you want to make sure knees feel good back feels good shoulders feel good you know anything like that um it's like just to be just to
Speaker 1be clear there's this this is a really interesting problematic area because there's actually no guarantee that how you feel is going to be protective of you know no more than that happens in a workshop i mean you could feel great and then like suddenly sort of because of accumulated damage over the previous weeks you've been training like an idiot you actually tear something off um and so the feeling isn't necessarily protective it's just like yeah if we're feeling like we we can detect some kind of residual soreness in a muscle we can detect some kind of feeling of weakness there or something doesn't feel like it's moving correctly there's some kind of restriction or tightness or whatever and we feel that's going to change the way that we would normally do the exercise then yeah that's absolutely yeah you know so i think what you get is you get like some you get some kind of warnings for some things but it doesn't actually guarantee that you're going to be fine because no i mean like it's very visible i wasn't referring
Speaker 2to it from like an injury prevention or like diagnosis standpoint but like even myself like you know if something feels really terrible on say the first few sets you know prior to like a working set and for me you know like the low 400s or so i might not do that work so that day um yeah i mean i've i've certainly had not lifting but in doing other things injuries you know like strain injuries and that where there's no sign at all nothing could have predicted it it just kind of happens so it's not yeah like you said it's not telling you whether or not you're gonna get injured or likely to get injured but if it feels really horrible then you know you know maybe you should adjust things that day if your bar speed is slower as well so you plan to work up to a certain load but bar speeds in the way up are not good um you know indicating whatever you're fatigued whatever it might be well maybe you don't you know now you could not train or you know at least adjust the loading and things like that so it definitely gives you some opportunity to make some changes and that before you just jump up to a giant you know three five rep max whatever it is totally uh and
Speaker 1and this is because the exercise has a coordination component as a result you have to be able to stabilize the weight and if you fail to stabilize the weight then it will go off balance and it will then require you to do things that you probably can't do you know if you try and stabilize a weight from a position that you haven't stabilized the weight from before you will be using muscles that haven't developed to be able to do those things and you will then push them to a point where they actually can't do that thing and you may end up straining them because you tilt too much you move in a particular direction that's because the weight because the exercise is a complex coordination pattern so this is the point i'm making when you have like a powerlifting community and i don't want to label them as the powerlifting community it's like anything you can do you can do it you can do it you can do it you can do it anybody who trains with free weights and complex exercises you could be a bodybuilder training in that way i mean absolutely and those bodybuilders will have the same problem talking to the to the machine-based bodybuilders they'll be like how are you guys just doing a couple of reps and then going straight into your work so that makes no sense to us yes because there's no coordination requirement you don't need to stabilize the weight there's if something if some it can't go out of path it's like i was trying to say if something goes wrong nothing can go wrong really because you can't go off path because the path is fixed you actually can't just it just yeah it's like um as long as you haven't set the machine up incorrectly so that it can take you back past your comfortable range of motion you can just go back to the start yeah so i i genuinely think that the main problem um aside from the complete misunderstandings about the physiology that we addressed before which is mainly an influencer issue it's not really a community issue i think the main issue in the community is that people who are doing free weights and requiring a lot of time to get to the point where they're comfortable with the um kind of lift that they're doing for the work set they are talking to people who are using machines and they're just they're talking past each other that's the problem
Speaker 2yeah i mean if you look like older i mean even current like olympic weightlifters you know you watch guys like dimitri kolkov and like that warm up um you know warm up they do uh like static stretching they do all kinds of things to be prepared to get into those you know very large ranges of motions and things like that and then you know people will be like oh you don't need to stretch before you lift yeah but they're getting to the point where
Speaker 1they're comfortable that their range of motion will not limit the extremely difficult um movement that they're about to do you know like do you need to be able to stretch to do a hamstrings curl no because you don't need to change your range of motion to do that um you know like overhead
Speaker 2squat all the way to the floor you might need to do something first i'd
Speaker 1probably need some kind of surgical intervention but yeah i mean like so yeah but i think this is an important uh kind of consideration so okay but yeah in terms of doing this though even then the preparatory repetitions do not need to be like large in number for each increment of weight so like um if you're preparing to do a heavy work set on the squat um you do not need to do like 10 repetitions with the bar 20 you know or 20 repetitions with about 10 repetitions with you know kind of a plate on each side or whatever you do not need to be doing that you can literally do one or two repetitions at each increment work your way up and that's going to minimize the fatigue you experience and therefore maximize the gains that you get in terms of stimulating adaptions but the problem is again the label warm-up has drifted into affecting what people are actually doing so they're going well of course i need to actually warm the muscle up or you're not warming the muscle up however many repetitions you do it's
Speaker 2just not possible yeah i mean i do i just plate up and do a single at each plate and then okay yes i
Speaker 1think that's a little bit pushing it but okay you know i mean if you're happy doing that i'm pretty
Speaker 2lazy with my my my ramp upsets because i'm just usually i'm pretty limited on time so i do my
Speaker 1sure hour and then i just play it up yeah let's don't don't don't miss minutes in the shower you i'm probably i would probably i'd say probably um i would i mean i don't i don't do that anymore it's not my focus but when i was um focusing on my squat um my free weight squat then i'd probably be uh i probably having an increment halfway in between those um um so i mean i was working with with kilogram plates so i'll be working basically with 10 10 kilograms on each side as a as an increment um for most of the way up and then when you get when i got close to the bottom of the set is how i felt and now i kind of work with smaller increments but um well most people that's a better option i think that's probably a more sensible approach but yeah i mean but again sort of one or two repetitions and the purpose is to be get comfortable and confident with that particular um kind of coordination pattern for that lift uh on the day you know because yeah your body does feel different every single day and um it's also an opportunity just to check that everything is okay and you're not going to hurt yourself uh ultimately i think that is really 99 of the debates about warm-ups is people going well of course i need to work because i'm and then you realize that they're doing a bench press or a squat or deadlift or something else like that and so we have but you're talking about preparatory repetitions getting comfortable and confident under the weight on the day which is totally and utterly valid but it's not actually doing any of the stuff that exercise science talks about when it talks about warming up no but there you go so um have i missed anything have we missed anything rob i think we got it all and we got it all that was a mammoth i said to you at the beginning i said this is going to be a mammoth episode there's so much to say okay so um i'll try and recap very quickly um what we did we started off talking about temperature and how muscle temperature actually is a positive thing to improve and we talked about some practical ways of managing that we also then talked about potentiation what you can do what it doesn't do uh we went on and talked about some of the things that um psychological uh interventions that help warm-ups probably aren't doing that but you know not to say that you can't make a warm-up be um kind of helpful in that regard but there's just no real data supporting it uh we talked about practice and our practice uh isn't really something you can incorporate into a warm-up because it's much kind of more load specific and people are giving it credit for and um in in the context of that argument form is something i think is being overplayed and um you know bigged up i think a lot more than it actually is capable of of supporting uh and then yeah we kind of uh sort of finished off talking about um what preparatory repetitions as we should probably be calling them actually are doing and when they're useful and when they're probably not really doing anything so yeah i mean when you're seeing um kind of influences on the science-based side saying warm-ups are useless don't bother doing them what they're saying is in the context of a bodybuilding workout where you're doing moderate moderate or moderately heavy maybe repetitions of a machine exercise and you've already kind of done your kind of temperature based warm-up uh then doing preparatory repetitions probably isn't doing very much no it's not really doing very much um just do as many as you feel you need to be comfortable and for some people that'll be one or two for some people that might be four or five or even ten it doesn't really matter it's personal um on the athletic side or the power lifting side um yeah um it will be sensible to do a whole ton of preparatory repetitions working your way up to the work you do to make sure that you're comfortable and safe in the scenario that you're doing them in um but really this is not part the exercise science warm-up conversation it's not it's a completely separate thing that's related to you know actual practice of um getting us comfortable under the bar in a um powerlifting or athletic related free weight scenario um and i think that's why the confusion exists it's one of those terminology problems and people talking past each other but um talked uh quite a lot today i think that's probably going to be on record as our longest ever episode so let's stop there and we will come back next week with a different topic
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