Upper East Side

Warming up can be surprisingly tricky. Coach Jenna walks you through it.

We’ve all been there: You walk into the gym after a grueling six weeks of training, all set to PR your back squat or push press, and you find yourself missing weights you thought you could handle, or worse — missing lifts you’ve made in the past. What happened? Usually, the answer is you either didn’t warm up properly, or you warmed up too much and exhausted yourself before getting to your maximal lift. How can we avoid this? When it comes to warming up for a max lift, there’s no perfect, results-guaranteed way to do it. My goal here is to give you a way to warm up enough, without tiring yourself out so much that you can’t hit your desired weights. A Google Map to a PR, if you will.

First, take advantage of the prescribed warm up. The movements I’ve put in are designed to get your heart rate up, as well as prepare your muscles for each specific lift. Even though you’ll be doing a number of warm up sets for your lift, it’s important to make sure your body is prepped and ready to tackle heavy loads.

The best way to warm up for a max lift is pretty obvious: multiple sets at sub-maximal loads. But which percentages? And how many sets? Your mileage may vary depending on how much you’re lifting (for example, if your 1RM is 400 pounds, you may need more time in between sets and/or a slower build up), but the following table is a good place to start.

The first four sets are fairly easy and shouldn’t tire you out too much. Make sure you take your full 5 minutes after your single at 90% before going for a PR. Once you’ve missed a rep at a max load, it’s very hard for your central nervous system to recover. Nothing sucks more than knowing you could have hit a PR if you’d only rested a little longer. In addition, never waste a rep at your previous max. Why hit 250# again when you know you can? Just go right to 255# or 260#, depending on how your 90% felt.

For those of you who don’t have a 1RM, the best thing to do is talk to your coach to determine what your 1RM “should” be, depending on how you’ve been progressing your 5×5 throughout the last 6 weeks. Together, you should be able to come up with a ballpark figure to shoot for. And always err on the side of lighter. If you think you can hit 185#, start with 175# and go from there.

As always, you guys have crushed it this cycle. The squats have been especially challenging, as well as the conditioning, and you’ve all risen to the challenge and surpassed my expectations. Looking forward to seeing and hearing about all the PRs this week! Good luck!