How to Warmup and Lift Heavy Weights Safely (Cold Start Problem) | Ep 351
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Most lifters either skip their warmup or spend 30 minutes on elaborate routines that miss the point.
Learn how the engineering concept of the Cold Start Problem reveals the systematic approach to preparing your body for heavy lifting.
Discover why your body needs a proper boot sequence before loading heavy weights, and how to design a targeted warmup that primes your nervous system for peak performance while serving as a diagnostic tool for your training readiness.
Main Takeaways:
Your body operates like a computer system that requires proper initialization before running high-performance tasks
The 3-phase warmup sequence: System Power-On, Hardware Check, and Application-Specific Loading
Your warmup serves as both preparation and diagnostic tool... listen to what your body is telling you!
Movement-specific ramp-up sets are non-negotiable; everything else is optional based on your needs
Distinguish between normal muscle soreness (DOMS) and pain that signals potential problems
Episode Mentioned:
Never Fall Off Track Again with Your Fitness or Fat Loss - Risk management principles for training
Timestamps:
1:16 - Why most warmup approaches are fundamentally flawed
3:37 - The Cold Start Problem
6:13 - The 3-phase warmup sequence
10:41 - Example: How to warmup for a 405-pound deadlift
14:50 - The biggest warmup mistakes to avoid
17:49 - Using your warmup as a diagnostic tool
19:03 - DOMS vs. pain
20:59 - Customizing warmups for different scenarios
24:39 - Systemic communication within your body during warmups
Stop Skipping Your Warmup if You Want to Lift Heavy and Stay Injury‑Free
Most lifters think warming up means breaking a sweat or stretching for a few minutes. Others see it as wasted time. Both mindsets miss the point. Your body is a complex system. If you jump straight into heavy squats or deadlifts without properly preparing, it is like trying to run demanding software on a computer that is still booting up. Performance suffers, and the risk of injury skyrockets.
The Cold Start Problem in the Gym
When you’ve been sitting all day or you train first thing in the morning, your muscles are cold, your joints have less synovial fluid circulating, and your nervous system is not primed to fire. If you load a heavy barbell in that state, you’re forcing a “cold start.” Instead of operating at peak output, your body is scrambling to catch up. That lag robs you of strength, makes your movement patterns sloppy, and puts you at risk for strains or worse.
Build a Warmup That Actually Works
A smart warmup is short, intentional, and specific. You don’t need 30 minutes of foam rolling, activation drills, and mobility circuits. You also don’t need to skip it altogether. Treat your warmup like a boot sequence with three phases:
1. System Power On (General Warmup)
Three to five minutes of light movement to raise your core temperature. A rower, bike, brisk walk, or a few bodyweight moves are enough. On a warm day or later in the day when you’ve been active, you can skip this step.
2. Hardware Check (Mobility and Range of Motion)
A quick diagnostic for your joints and movement quality. Can you get into a deep squat without restriction? Does your shoulder feel stable? If you have a history of injuries, add a few targeted stretches or mobility drills here. Keep it brief and specific.
3. Movement‑Specific Loading (Non‑Negotiable)
This is where most lifters should focus. Perform the lift you’re about to train, starting with an empty bar or very light weight, then ramp up with progressively heavier sets. Fewer reps as the weight increases. Each ramp‑up set grooves your technique, primes your nervous system, and gives you instant feedback on how ready your body is.
Avoid These Common Warmup Mistakes
Spending 20 minutes on every possible drill and wasting energy before the main work.
Skipping warmups entirely and jumping into heavy sets cold.
Using the same generic warmup regardless of the day’s lifts.
Treating warmup time as physical therapy for underlying movement problems that need separate attention.
Warmup as a Diagnostic Tool
A good warmup doesn’t just prepare you physically. It tells you how you’re performing today. If a weight that usually feels easy feels unusually heavy, or if pain appears rather than normal soreness, that is your signal to adjust. Maybe you drop the load, switch an exercise, or take extra rest.
Morning, Age, and PR Days
If you train in the morning or are over 40, add a little extra time or smaller jumps between warmup sets. On PR days, be meticulous with your ramp‑up sets. Stop a few steps short of the PR to conserve energy and give yourself the best shot at a successful lift.
The Payoff
A warmup isn’t a chore. It is part of your training program. It lets you lift heavier, safer, and with better technique. It primes your nervous system, wakes up your movement patterns, and gives you critical feedback so you can train with confidence.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
If you're jumping straight from walking into the gym to loading plates on the bar, you're making a critical systems error that is robbing you of strength and inviting injury. Most lifters think warming up is about getting loose or breaking a sweat, but your body operates like a complex system and trying to run high-performance tasks before properly initializing is a recipe for malfunction. Today, we're exposing why most warm-ups are either too long, too short or completely missing the point. You'll discover the engineering principle that explains what happens when you start lifting cold, how to design a boot sequence that primes your nervous system for peak performance, and why the difference between muscle soreness and actual pain could save your training career. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're tackling something that happens before you even touch your first working set in the gym, but might be the most critical part of your entire training session.
Philip Pape: 1:16
Now most lifters approach warming up like it is a mystical ritual involving foam rollers, resistance bands, dynamic stretching. You know enough to choreograph a dancer team and, trust me, I've been there. I used to do CrossFit. Others treat it like an annoying speed bump between walking into the gym and getting to the real work. Let's just get this over with. But I think both approaches are flawed because they misunderstand the purpose of the warmup and what it needs to accomplish, which is what we're talking about today. The truth is that your body, like we talk about all the time on the show, is a sophisticated system. I've learned from hard knocks, my own injuries and surgeries and other bumps and bruises along the way, that it requires purpose and intentionality. And if we're to use an analogy of a computer, you need to initialize your operating system so that you can operate at peak performance. And if you skip the sequence or if you execute it in the wrong way, you're not just missing out on the gains, the reason that you're in the gym, but you're actually potentially holding your back and making it harder on your physiology, on your recovery.
Philip Pape: 2:22
Now, before we get into the specifics of building up your warmup routine, I do want to share something that can help you systematize this and be very intentional about how you do it. Wits and Weights Physique University gives you those frameworks. We have a course called Lifting Lessons in our training templates course and it gives you chunks of practical recommendations on every one of these and it demos how to do different things, how to warm up, what to have in your gym bag, how to use a power rack, how to live safely, et cetera. And that's how I've structured it, because I've learned from personal experience, from coaching people, from training, what really works for these different things and how people get stuck when they want to go and start lifting weights. So if you're totally new to lifting, or if you've been lifting but you're not confident enough with some of these things, we can definitely help you there and we are relaunching at a much lower tier. It's $27 a month, used to be $87 a month and if you join using my link in the show notes, I'm going to build you a custom nutrition plan at no extra cost. It is a combination of nutrition, training and lifestyle in there A lot of great courses, no pressure, a good community, and it's going to help you get where you want to go. All right, let's talk about warming up and understanding what we're actually trying to solve here.
Philip Pape: 3:37
In systems engineering, we have something called the cold start problem. When you power on a computer from a completely shut down state, it's cold, right, it doesn't immediately operate at its full capability. You've probably seen this with your own computer at home. If it's been off and you turn it up, it takes a while to kind of crunch on. You know, not everything is ready to go. There's just this lag there, right. The system has to load the operating system, it has to initialize drivers, allocate memory, synchronize all the components. And if you try to just jump into, like your video editor or some high performance application before it completes, you know it might crash, you might get an error, it might just really slow down until it's ready to go. Computers get better and better at handling all of this stuff.
Philip Pape: 4:25
But if we think of your body as working the same way, I think it's a good analogy for this process from the time you walk into the gym to the time you lift. So when you walk into the gym, especially guys and girls, ladies who've been sitting at a desk all day, raise your hand, okay, or you just rolled out of bed. Because I train early in the morning, I do try to take some time to eat and read and kind of wake up mentally before I go to the gym. But not all of you have that luxury and some of you just jump right into it. Your musculoskeletal system and your nervous system, it's like they're powered down, it's like they have to have a cold start right. Your muscles are at a very low temperature, your joints don't have the synovial fluid circulating yet, your nervous system isn't yet primed for rapid force production, the kind of power that we put into place when we lift weights, and your motor patterns are a little bit sluggish and a little bit dormant. And so if you load heavy weight onto this unrepaired system, it again is like the analogy I just said trying to launch a really demanding program on a computer. That is still like trying to start up. You're asking for poor performance at best and a crash at worst. And I just I like this analogy. I nerd out on this stuff, if you don't just bear with me.
Philip Pape: 5:37
So where most people screw it up, I'll say, is they either skip the warmup entirely. And I know some of you starting strength guys you're like, oh, I'll just jump right into the lift and warm up with the lift. Okay, I get it, and that might be part of the solution and there's still a way to warm up properly doing it that way. But that's one approach. Other extreme is I'm going to spend 20 or 30 minutes of my workout doing all the warmups, and this week I'm going to add in mobility, and then I'm going to add in breathing, and I'm going to add in dynamic stretching right, and it's like I have to do all this stuff and there's a nice happy medium, right? We don't need to do all of this and we also don't need to skip everything.
Philip Pape: 6:13
The fundamental principle here is that your warmup should be targeted for you, based on your needs and recoverability, and so I'm going to give you some options today. Think of it as having three distinct phases and think about the phases that you need and how long they need to be. Some of these phases may be minimal to non-existent, and others may be the most helpful thing that you personally need in the gym. So phase one is the system power on. We're gonna use the computer analogy. This is the general warmup, and if you're like me, who lives in the Northeast, I train over over my garage where it's like 50 degrees in the winter. It is cold, I'm cold, my muscles are cold, and this is like three to five minutes at most of some sort of low intensity movement. Maybe you have a rower, maybe you have an assault bike like I do, maybe I have just walk around the gym. I don't want you to be running or sprinting at this point. Just keep it easy, light and warm yourself up. Just move.
Philip Pape: 7:13
The goal isn't to break a sweat or to exhaust yourself. You're just increasing your core body temperature. You're getting your joints lubed up with a synovial fluid and if you're already warm, or if it's a warm day or you've been sweating, you know, then you could skip this. You could skip it. I mean honestly, if you're, if it's 4 PM, you've been working all day, you've been moving around, it's a, it's a pleasant day. You probably don't even need to warm up. You know. Increase your body temperature, that's it. So don't do the dynamic stretches or any of that stuff. Or you know you don't have to do jump ropes. You don't have to do leg skips, any of that. You don't have to. I mean, you could, obviously, but I'm not going to waste my power, my muscles or any of that on the warmup. I'm going to keep that for the lifting. So that's phase one. Phase two is like the hardware check right. So now you've warmed up, now you got to make sure things are operating right.
Philip Pape: 8:05
This is where you prep your movement. You do maybe some targeted stuff if needed, and what I mean by that is maybe some stretching or mobility work. If you have, for example, limitation most people, especially the younger you are and if you don't have a history of any issues, you don't need any stretching at all. And some might argue that too much stretching could be a negative when you get under the bar right, because you kind of have almost an over-flexibility versus the kind of strong, slight springiness, stiffness if you will. But what you're looking for here is whether everything is moving and feeling good. Can you get into that squat position? Can you reach overhead? Is your low back feeling good? Nothing feels like it's going to spring out of place.
Philip Pape: 8:50
For those of us with a history of shoulder injuries or knee issues or whatever, do you need to throw on your compression sleeves at this point? Do you need to do stretches under the bar right? If you're squatting? This is a really good one. It might mean grabbing the bar in the rack and just getting under and stretching into that squat position to warm up your shoulders. You know your thoracic rotation, just kind of making sure you've got that range of motion, Some wall slides. If you're talking about overhead pressing, your shoulders are very stiff.
Philip Pape: 9:22
I can go on and on about shoulder stretching myself with bands and stuff. But again, you may not even need this. It's not about activation drills or elaborate movement sequences or pre-exercise or anything like that. It's just is your hardware functioning for the patterns that you are now going to load? That's all it is. But I wanted to mention it because it's an important piece that I do think some people dismiss it as like, eh, nobody has to do that. No, some people do have to do that and I'm acknowledging that for you. But it doesn't have to be a crazy amount, just a little bit of stretching for a few minutes per your needs.
Philip Pape: 9:58
And then the final phase, and this is the non-negotiable part. So again, phases one and two may be partly optional or totally optional for you. The final phase is the, I'll say, application-specific loading. So if we're gonna take the computer analogy but it also that term applies to our body this is where you perform the movement that you're going to train. That's it. You perform the movement you're going to train and you start light and you gradually increase the load until you reach your working weight, and you do that by starting with a higher number of reps at a very lightweight and then jumping up in reasonable increments higher weights, lower reps, taking a little bit of rest but not too much all the way until you're ready for the working sets.
Philip Pape: 10:41
And so what does that look like in practice? Let's say let's go with a big weight Just to give you the full Monty. Here You're going to deadlift 405 and that's your working set. Okay, and maybe it's singles or doubles or triples, doesn't matter whatever, you're 405. So you're going to have a ramp up. It's going to look something like this you might start with the empty barbell. Now, granted, somebody lifting 405 may not start with the empty barbell, is probably going to jump right to 135. But hey, it doesn't hurt.
Philip Pape: 11:08
In fact, you can consider that part of phase two. That's like stretching into the movement right, start with the empty barbell, see how everything feels with your back, with your hip hinging, your knees, you know. Make sure the form is good. Another wrong with doing that it's going to take an extra minute or two. So you might start with the empty barbell for five or 10 reps. Do it once or twice, then you're going to take, you know, enough time to load 45s on the plate to warm up for 135. And you might do that for five or eight, right? I know starting strength has a model where it's like it's like five, five, three, two, one, but that's because they're going for fives. For you you might want to go with more reps at the lower weight and then you know, go eight, five, three, two, one, for example. Just just an idea. So you're dead lifting one, 35 or eight. Okay, add two more 45s, two, 25 for five. Add two more 45s, three, 15 for three.
Philip Pape: 11:58
You notice I'm jumping, kind of it's not a tiny, it's not tiny jumps, it's it's reasonable jumps to kind of split the whole thing from empty bar to working weight into like five or six segments, right, so 315 for three. Then you add, maybe at that point you add the 25s, and do 365 for a double, and then you could jump to 405 right from there. Some people want to have a little extra single snuck in there, so you might jump to 385 for a single and then you're 405, right, it's a little bit of an art, a little bit of a science. The point is you got to feel good, you have to feel warmed up, and so this allows you to gauge your movement readiness as you get to that point, which also helps you understand whether the weight's going to feel good, how you're going to perform right. It gives you a lot of aspects of self-regulation that people miss when they don't warm up properly or intentionally.
Philip Pape: 12:50
So notice what's happening here right. You're not just getting warm because that will warm you up by the way Like that alone will warm most people up. You're rehearsing the movement pattern. You're teaching your nervous system to coordinate all of the muscles involved and you're gradually loading the tissues to prepare them for heavier weight. You're recruiting more and more muscle fibers. You're just gradually kind of massaging out that muscle system, if you will.
Philip Pape: 13:16
And so each ramp up set is both a warmup and a practice session, a skill development session, and so you treat them seriously. You don't just rush through each warmup set. You're thinking about your cues, your form, and because they're light, they allow you to screw up a little bit as you're getting over that morning. Or you know that initial clumsiness that we all have when we first start our warmup in the gym, which is great, because then, by the time you hit real serious weights, you're going to be solid, and this approach is supported by every credible strength coach. I know Eric Helms calls it movement-specific preparation. Greg Knuckles says that if you're going to do one thing, make it specific to what you're training. Mark Ripito of Starting Strength says that you warm up with the movement you're about to train. That's the warm-up. So it kind of is consistent, but it doesn't preclude doing some of the other things we talked about ahead of time if needed.
Philip Pape: 14:09
Speaking of systemic approaches and intentionality, this is what we teach inside Physique University. Again, just to accelerate the process for you and in case you feel like you're still going to be guessing when you go to the gym, we've got a course that walks you through these and, of course, support and accountability so you can post and say hey, how do I warm up for my squat today? I'm doing this at this weight. Is this what I should be doing? Does this training program make sense? You know, take out the guesswork, give you frameworks just 27 a month and I'm gonna throw in a custom nutrition plan today if you join using the special link in the show notes. If you go to the public website landing page, you get the same price, but you won't get the free plan. So use my link in the show notes.
Philip Pape: 14:50
All right, let's address some of the biggest mistakes that I see with warmups, because you know it's good to know what not to do as well, cause everybody's thinking here who's watching? Okay, that sounds great, but there are things that I've done for my warmup. Is it okay to do those? Can I keep doing them? Are they helpful? And I think I think the biggest first mistake a lot of people have and it comes from like the bootcamp world, crossfit, f45 world is the everything warmup right, where you spend a lot of time with foam rolling, with dynamic stretches, with mobility on every single limb, maybe yoga positions activating muscles that are firing just fine on their own right. I got to activate my glute muscles. That's actually overloading yourself. You're doing too much before, like you're loading too many background tasks before launching the main application, to go back to the computer analogy, right. So that's the first mistake.
Philip Pape: 15:46
Mistake number two is the other extreme, the nothing warmup. Go straight from the locker room to loading up, you know, maybe not the full working weight, but you go like half halfway there you do a warmup and then you load up the max on the bar, excuse me, right. And that's again like trying to run a graphics intensive game right after you turn on your computer. Right, you got to wait for everything to load up first. Mistake number three is, I'll say, the generic warmup. It's like this is my warmup. I do it all the time, right, it's the same routine, regardless of what you're training, and I would say that on a given day, based on what you're lifting, that the warmup is going to have to conform to get you ready for that. Yes, obviously, the lift itself will, by definition, do that for you. But even when you're like warming up joints and stuff, if I'm not doing any upper body, I'm not going to spend as much time loosening up my shoulder If I literally don't have to use my shoulder in almost any lift for the day. Like, why waste the time you don't really have to Understanding that there are systemic? You know there are connections in the body that are systemic such that you sometimes do need to do that, but you've got to make a judgment call on that. So that's mistake number three.
Philip Pape: 16:56
Mistake number four is another big one, and that is, I'll say, confusing warmups with therapy, right, like, in other words, like physical therapy, if you need 20 minutes of mobility work just to get into a squat position. I think that's more of a movement problem that has to be addressed separately. That's just my opinion. Even me, the guy with shoulder issues it doesn't take me that long to get ready to use my shoulder in a workout, knowing that the lift I'm going to apply next is appropriate for what I'm dealing with. If it's not appropriate, then you may feel like, geez, I need to do all of this stuff first to get into that position. That is just my opinion. You may disagree, you may have a specific limitation, you're like no, I really do 15 minutes, need 15 minutes. I'm just sharing like general mistakes people have where there could be something else going on and I alluded to this before.
Philip Pape: 17:49
But the warmup is a diagnostic tool. It is giving you real-time feedback about how your body, your system, is functioning right now. Today, if your usual warm-up weights like if you're going for that 405 deadlift but the warm-up at 315 just feels really, really heavy for some reason If your movement quality is off, maybe you're just low on energy. You've been dieting, you didn't have enough sleep, the quality is off. Low on energy, you've been dieting, you didn't have enough sleep, the quality is off. If you have pain rather than the normal soreness or stiffness, right, pain that wasn't there before, and you're like what is this? Your body is talking to you right then, and there, like that's a really good thing to listen, to listen to what's going on.
Philip Pape: 18:30
I don't want you to make excuses, right, because sometimes it feels a little heavy and it's just because we're still warming up and then we go after the working weight and you know what we get the working weight. It's fine, right? I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if something's off, something's just off, it might tell you something. And if you're in a dieting phase and you're using auto-regulated type programming like rep ranges, that may be the thing that's telling you. This is what I need to hit today for the reps or for the weight or for the RP or RIR. Right, I would say that's more of an advanced kind of thing, but the warmup can help with that.
Philip Pape: 19:03
And so one more thing comes to mind now that I think about it is the difference between soreness or delayed onset, muscle soreness, doms and pain, because I think some people confuse it too. Yes, I want you to warm up. If you have soreness, try warming up and seeing if you're good to go. But if it's an acute pain, a sharp pain, something that doesn't improve as you warm up, pain that gets worse as you're loading into the warmup, pains that's sharper, radiating pain that creates instability or you're compensating for because it just feels so weak, again it's telling you something and that is the point at which you're able to make a decision and do something about it. Okay, and some of us who've dealt with injuries and surgeries, we get really good at understanding whether our body's ready for something on a given day.
Philip Pape: 19:51
And it may not be that you just don't train. My preference is you train around it or you train something different. Right, if my back is like super sore and fatigued, even on a very light squat, I'm like well, you know, I remember in the past this has caused me to like have a flare up right. This is back in the day when I had a herniated disc, I don't know. So I don't get the pain, but it might tell me to hey, maybe I shouldn't be doing this today because it's right on the cusp. I'm going to do a different. Maybe a couple accessory lifts, like a leg press right and an RDL or something to work similar muscle groups.
Philip Pape: 20:26
So the warmup isn't just for prep, it's a really good diagnostic and then, when it reveals problems, you then have options right. Reducing the intensity, working around with different exercises yes, maybe skipping training I think that's the last resort. But the key here is to listen to the feedback that your body, your system provides and not just push through the warning signals. And that's not just me giving you a disclaimer, that's like really good practical advice. Now, if you're trying to customize your warmup for different scenarios, I wanted to give you some options here, because I know what your next question is like.
Philip Pape: 20:59
Well, what if I work out in the morning? Well, what if I do this? So morning sessions usually require a little more warmup. That's just the fact of it. Your nervous system is sluggish, your joints are stiffer, your core temperature is lower and you just may need to do a little bit extra, but not much, you know. An extra couple minutes, right? An extra ramp up set, something like that. And, by the way, once you're warmed up and have done a lift similar muscle groups that are being used for subsequent exercises you may not need to be warm up nearly as much. I always have one warm up set, you know, and subsequent lifts, unless it's super isolating, like a bicep curl, and even then I still might do a warmup set just to kind of prime things and then I can really hit it hard for the working set right. But an extra minute or two if needed, great, go for it.
Philip Pape: 21:46
If you are older right over 30, over 40, over 50, you know it's not really an age thing so much as a personal recovery thing you might benefit from more conservative jumps between the warmup weights. Your tissues may need, you know, more gradual loading. Hold on, I'm having tech issues on my end. Your tissues may need more gradual loading to reach the readiness versus when you were in your twenties, right, so you know the synovial fluid, the joints, the connective tissue. But again, don't use that as an excuse to go with a 20-minute warm-up.
Philip Pape: 22:20
If you're later in the day but you've been sitting all day or you're stressed to the brim right, which many of us are from our work, your movement quality could be compromised from that. It's very interesting because I work out in the morning almost always, but occasionally I'll have to work out in the afternoon to move things around and I just feel different. I actually don't feel as energized, I feel a little bit sluggish. My body's not used to it. So simply being in a different context or different gym, different day of the week, different time, you really just have to think about. Should my warmup be a little bit more intentional today? Right. Should I target anything more intentionally? Right, but keep it specific to what you've identified not undoing everything and warming up for 30 minutes If you have a max effort day. If you're going for a PR, right.
Philip Pape: 23:06
The warmup for that kind of lift is really critical. You want to be meticulous about the ramp up. You might want to take smaller jumps, but you don't want to over fatigue yourself for that single. But you might want to have a few singles near the target weight, but not too close to the target weight. It's like you're priming your nervous system to perform but you're not overstressing it. Definitely a little bit of art as well as science, but it is one of the most common questions I see, both in physique university and with my coach, andy Baker.
Philip Pape: 23:35
People ask like okay, how do I warm up to hit a PR? And my simplest explanation for that is you're going to warm up like any other lift. You might have an extra single or two. Don't make the last single too close to your last PR, right, keep it like some distance away and then go for a small PR, like, don't do a single that's near your PR already, cause that might tax you out too much. Where you can't hit a PR, give some room, take the time, the three, the four, the five minutes break and then go for that single, that max at your, you know, five pound PR, 10 pound or two and a half pound PR, whatever it is, just to give yourself the best chance of actually getting it. Now, if you miss it, you miss it. If you, but you gave yourself a chance, if you hit it and you feel great, then maybe that's a warmup for an even higher PR. That's just one more single in the way, and now you can take another three, four or five minute break and then hit another PR, right. But if it feels tough or a grind, stay there, like, like, take the wind, take the PR. That's the general philosophy for that.
Philip Pape: 24:39
So I mentioned I mentioned earlier at one point, how our body is systemic. Right, things are connected and I didn't want to forget to mention this. But you're, when you're warming up, right, when you've got the movement patterns and you're priming your nervous system, there's a lot of communication going on. Right, the muscles are an endocrine organ. That means hormones and signals involved, chemical signals, and so when you are ramping up those warmups you're already starting to get one of the benefits that I've talked about before about lifting, which is muscles that release signaling molecules called myokines and they help coordinate this response throughout your body. It is chemical messengers that response throughout your body. It is chemical messengers that are telling your body get ready for what's about to come. Because you're already kind of doing it right. You're warming up, doing those patterns, but you're doing them light. So it's nice because what you can do is now prime your whole system to increase your blood flow, to increase the firing of your nervous system, to tell your brain like we're ready to go and get focused here and like dial in that motor control, that mind muscle connection. So the warmup prepares your muscles and joints and whole body communication to optimize your performance when you're ready to go at it. So that's also why movement, specific warmups are so much more effective than just a general warmup. And then just jumping into the lift is to activate those neural pathways right, and the signal cascades all of that. So we just talked about all right.
Philip Pape: 26:06
So bottom line here, I think I covered everything I wanted to regarding warmups. Basically, the warmup is an important thing. It's not just increasing your temperature to getting loose, right, it's getting ready and getting feedback and diagnostic. It's not breaking a sweat, it's, you know, booting up that whole system so that you can hit it hard with the lift and do it safely and avoid injury. And the warmup should be individualized, just like your training program. It should be just like your goals. It it should be just like your goals. It should be intelligent, like the approach you take with everything else in the gym.
Philip Pape: 26:42
It is part of your training program, that's it. Whether it has to be pre-programmed for you, that's up to you and how much precision you want there. Some coaches will do that. Some people like to pre log what their warmup is going to look like. I don't think that's a bad idea when you're getting started, just to kind of take the thinking out of it when you get into the gym. And they're not a waste of time at all, as long as you don't waste time, right, they're not a waste of time unless you waste time. Unless you waste time is what I think I said. Right, it's, it's intentional and it gives you valuable information about how you are functioning and then you can pay attention to it and then adjust. That's it. Then you can go after PRs, then you can have healthy joints, then you can have safe lifting, then you're gonna feel confident, then you're gonna get the gains, and all because you took a few minutes to do this the right way.
Philip Pape: 27:30
All right, if you enjoyed this episode, I wanted to mention episode 234, which was from a while ago. It's called Never Fall Off Track Again with your Fitness or Fat Loss. It's about risk management principles, because I think warming up is a really solid risk management strategy, and that episode talked even more about risk management for everything that we do. So it's episode 234. I'll include the link in the show notes. Until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, in lifting, proper initialization prevents system failures and malfunctions. This is Philip Pape and you've been listening to Wits and Weights. I'll talk to you next time.
