Can Heavier Warm-Up Sets Boost Your Training Performance?

We all know warm-ups are important, but there’s often little guidance on how heavy they should be. This study offers insights suggesting that heavier warm-up sets might help increase your total training volume.

Overview

What did they test? The researchers had 15 recreationally trained male participants complete three different warm-up sessions using 40%, 60%, or 80% of their 10-repetition maximum (10RM) load, for a single set of 15, 10, or 5 repetitions, respectively. Each session included the warm-up set for the bench press, incline leg press, and wide grip lat pulldown, followed by three sets to failure at the participants' 10RM for each exercise.
What did they find? The heaviest warm-up condition, at 80% of 10RM, led to significantly greater total training volume across all sets to failure compared to the lighter warm-up conditions. For the bench press specifically, the 80% warm-up also produced significantly more training volume than the 60% warm-up. However, there were no significant differences in the fatigue index (i.e., the decline in repetitions from set one to set three) between the different warm-up conditions.
What does it mean for you? Warming up with loads closer to your working set may allow you to perform more total training volume than using lighter loads. However, this finding was based on using only a single warm-up set. These results suggest a heavier warm-up offers greater specificity and could help to potentiate performance in the following working sets.

What’s the problem?

Purpose

You've likely heard that you should start with a general aerobic activity before moving on to a more specific warm-up. The idea is that the general warm-up helps raise your body and muscle temperature, while the specific warm-up improves muscle activation and prepares the neuromuscular system for the task ahead. However, previous research suggests that a general warm-up may not provide extra benefits over just doing a specific warm-up when it comes to the volume performed during resistance training 1 2. Therefore, the specific warm-up may be the most critical part of getting ready for your resistance training session.

The purpose of this study was to compare specific warm-up sets at different loads across several resistance exercises to determine whether lighter or heavier warm-up sets lead to better performance in the subsequent training sets.