Warming up

I'm confused about warming up, am i meant to warm up before each exercise 

Eg. warm up then FL, Warm up then sPL. 

?????

It somewhat depends on what exercises you are on. If you are on all PE1's then you can just do a general warm-up and then jump into the exercises. If you are on later PE's though, which place much greater forces on the connective tissues and greater demands on the nervous system, then doing some warm-ups of easier already mastered PE's/iM's will help to prepare the body for the PE/iM you are working on. This also allows you to maintain proficiency with exercises that perhaps demonstrated weak links in your kinetic chain.

It's the exact same thing that you would do if lifting free weights. You wouldn't just walk into the gym and load up a 5RM weight on the bar and try to squat it; you would do some reps with a very light weight to warm-up the muscles and "groove" the movement pattern, then add a little weight and do some more reps, then a little more, then more, decreasing reps with each subsequently heavier warm-up set until you eventually reached your 5RM weight. At that point your connective tissues would be very warm, your muscles would have plenty of blood and nutrients flowing through them, and your neuromuscular system would be primed for your heavy "work sets".

In a traditional body part split you may only do this for the first exercise for each body part, but since Foundation and GST in general is less focused on a specific muscle and more about developing certain key movement patterns and body shapes, it becomes more appropriate to warm-up each movement.

It doesn't have to be a really long process though as you should not be pushing yourself hard and burning yourself out while warming up (regardless of whether it's GST or traditional resistance training) and you should be doing PE's and iM's that you have already previously mastered.

I prefer to do all my warmup sets at the beginning, then do work sets back to back with very little rest. Other people prefer to do them sort of modular-- warmup + work sets, then next element warmup + work sets. Other people again have a bit of both.

Keegan has good advice for you ^ but it can be worth playing around with it too, and try changing again as you advance. When I started I couldn't have done my current warmup and still put in my best on the work sets; now it is my preferred approach.

I also prefer to do all of my warmup sets first, then work sets.

 

- Cody

Jon and Cody, when did you guys switch over from a warm up + work sets, warm up + work sets to all of the warmups then work sets ?

Shortly after I decided to do F7 rather than a split. Didn't like the feeling of getting raring to go, then dialling down, then back up. Once I start I want to keep the pace up till I'm done.

That's just me

I started from the beginning, more or less. Once I had more than one element past PE1, I started doing all of my warm ups first. Like Jon, once I get going, I like to stay going until I'm done.

 

- Cody