The One Thing You Must Always Do If You Want To Build Muscle Safely
The One Thing You Must Always Do If You Want To Build Muscle Safely
One of the most important aspects of successfully building muscle is warming up properly. Unfortunately it's not a very exciting topic, which is maybe why it gets overlooked.
That said, it's vital that you understand the right way to warm up, because if you lift weights without being properly warmed up you're inviting a serious injury. If you subject your cold muscles to large amount of stress without warming them up first it's only a matter of time before you pull or tear something, and these type of injuries can take an age to heal.
A couple of distinctions I need to make here -
1/ There are two types of warming up - warming up before your weights workout and doing specific warm up sets prior to your heavier work sets - this article is about these specific warm up sets.
2/ I'm not, repeat not talking about stretching here - that is a different topic.
So let's take a closer look at these warm up sets before your work sets.
A common fault is to rush through the warm up sets because you're so keen to get on and do the all important work sets, the heavy sets that build the muscle. This is a huge mistake.
Think of the warm up set as performing two vital functions in your muscle building;
First, they prepare your joints and muscles for the heavier work to follow - this is a bit like having oil in a car - without oil the car will seize up. Likewise, warm up sets lubricate your joints and muscles before the work sets.
Second, they act as a rehearsal for the work sets to follow. I don't care how experienced you are and how long you've lifted weights, even if you think that your exercise technique is perfect, you must, repeat must use the warm up sets as a rehearsal so that you can get the form down before your work sets.
Sometimes your warm up sets feel terrible - the groove is all wrong, the weight feels too heavy and so on. It's far better to have this happen in the warm up than the work set proper, and in my experience at least, a bad warm up set often lead to a good work set - its a chance to get the bugs out of your system before the real work starts.
OK, I hope I've convinced you how important warm up sets are. But how many should you do, and what sort of weight should you lift as you warm up?
As a rule, the bigger the exercise is, the more warming up you should do. For example, the squat is a very big exercise, whereas the dumbbell curl is a much smaller exercise. You will need more warm up sets on the squat or the dead lift than you'll need for the dumbbell curl or the calf raise, because they're smaller exercises.
As a very rough guide, I suggest one warm up set for a small isolation exercise (like the calf raise), and at least two, better still three for the really big exercises like the dead lift and squat. Start from there and fine tune to what suits you best.
As regards weight, and another very rough guide, try this for a big exercise like the squat. Obviously I don't know what you can squat with, so this is based on a percentage of your top work set weight;
Warm up set one 50% of your work set weight 8 reps
Warm up set two 65% of your work set weight 6 reps
Warm up set three 80% of your work set weight 4 reps
Again, start from here and fine tune to what suits you best.
A final thought - in winter, do more warming up than in the hot months, and as you get older, you may need to do more warming up anyway. You want to be loose and primed for your workout sets without being exhausted, but if in doubt err on the side of more warming up than less.
I hope this helps - good luck!
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