necessary to warm up?

ive been training with weights for about 6 years and now bodyweight training some time, but i cant remember the last time i warmed up before training.. i think its boring and i havent ever experienced anything negative with not warming up really..

is it really necessary to warm up?

For maximum performance, yes.

slizzardman said:

For maximum performance, yes.

you mean for the first set? after the first set, with for example weighlifting, i will allready be warmed up..

Not only for maximum performance but for safety too. Why risk an injury if a warm up can take just a few minutes and can be fun too. Besides of fun maximum preformance and most for prevention of injury, it can be a very useful learning process if you know how to orginaze your warm up.

Search for warm up on this GB forum and you will find some recently posted by me, blairbob and other forum members on this topic.

Gregor said:

Not only for maximum performance but for safety too. Why risk an injury if a warm up can take just a few minutes and can be fun too. Besides of fun maximum preformance and most for prevention of injury, it can be a very useful learning process if you know how to orginaze your warm up.

Search for warm up on this GB forum and you will find some recently posted by me, blairbob and other forum members on this topic.

Thanks, but since I have trained for like 8 years now without warming up and yet havent hurt myself, is it really that important to begin with?

If you didn't got hurt, that doesn't mean you won't.

8 years is a long time, I guess your trainings were very light. Even with watming up, good pre-hab, people get some kind of injury (of course smaller injuries or/and rarely).

8 years is a long time, I guess your trainings were very light.

And probably you were young. The older you are, the more you need warm-up.

Is hard to believe that even as bodybuilder you didn't warm up, and get the highest weight from first set. If you started with 15-12 reps at first set that's the warm-up of BB.

At gymnastics i find more important to warm up as the scale of weight is less measurable, so you have to be ready if you go over your possibilities. And you are ready if your muscles are warm than if not.

And to take most of your strength is also important, as braindix has said in other post or articles.

lets say youre right, BUT even if you didnt warm up, you would only be "unprepared" under the first set. after you did the first set, you would be warmed up, right? i think the risk of getting hurt in just one set is very small.

Well usually the first set is not the heaviest, but the lightest so the risk is lower, but everything dependes on how you do it (form) and how heavy you go, not just because is just one, two or three sets are few until you get warm compared with the total sets, the risk is lower, is lower because they are warm up sets (and then you take it slower or lighter).

I find that I have to warm up to be able to do a adv. tuck back lever. have a loook at what coach sommer uses as a warm up in the WODS, often 2-3 sets of an easier progression of the exercises you are about to perform

mr jones said:

I find that I have to warm up to be able to do a adv. tuck back lever. have a loook at what coach sommer uses as a warm up in the WODS, often 2-3 sets of an easier progression of the exercises you are about to perform

i actually discovered a more effective way to warm up when i was weightlifting som years ago. instead of doing 2-3 lighter warm up sets, i would rather put on more weight than i would lift for my work set. for example if my work set was 100kg, i would load on 140kg and just do some partial reps. that way the 100kg would feel so much lighter. based on that experience, i think that the traditional way to warm up isnt the best way. preparing the nervous system for heavy lifting this way is very effective.

halluites,

Don't be so quick to generalize from your experiment of one. Ask yourself the question of why over the many years of thousands of coaches working with millions of athletes no one else has converged on using your same idea. It's logically possible you are on to something, but you will need to show more proof than yourself that your way is best in order to overcome current thinking on warm-ups.

I used to do very similar things.I never warmed up, although to be fair the gym on our ship as always around 85-90 degrees since it was right on top of the egine rooms. So we never had to worry about being cold

But, now that I am warming up properly, I have found that my performance on my work sets is better. I push my self to the limit with each workout that I do, and I find that my limits increase faster with proper warm up. That tends to be the results that everyone experiences.

Having said that, you have yet to describe what you mean by this "warming up" that you are clearly so heavily biased against.

A good warm up prepares you directly for the movements you are about to perform through activation of the nervous system in the movements similar to what you will perform, and by physically heating up the muscle, which increases that muscle's ability to generate force ( compared to the same muscle cold).

You have clearly decided you do not need to warm up, so I am having a hard time understanding why you are even posting this.

im not against warming up but i dont see the big necessity of doing it to perform at a high level and prevent injury. and i got many years experience hard training, so its not like im talking out of my ass or something. i have no problem with doing for example a front lever with maximum effort without warming up. i even maxed on exercises like deadlift when i was lifting with weights without warming up, no problem whatsoever. after the first set i was warm anyway.

halluites,

first of all, how much do you weight/lift? Do you do your exercise on full ROM? Are you especially gifted :-) ?

Second, warm up reduce risks of injury up to zero, increase efficiency and prepare you even mentally for the workout.

I now spend 5 min running on threadmill and do four sets of 10-5-3-2 with 20%-50%-65%-75% of intensity, which is about other 5 min. With this kind of warmup I'm always training in the best way possible, and never skipped an increase.

halluites said:

im not against warming up but i dont see the big necessity of doing it to perform at a high level and prevent injury. and i got many years experience hard training, so its not like im talking out of my ass or something. i have no problem with doing for example a front lever with maximum effort without warming up. i even maxed on exercises like deadlift when i was lifting with weights without warming up, no problem whatsoever. after the first set i was warm anyway.

I have done the same things. I can tell you from personal experience that I, and therefore most likely you, can perform a bit better after a good thorough warm up. Have you ever actually done a good thorough warm up based around preparing you for the activities to come?

I am not claiming that the warmup makes you superman But one or two extra reps with a few extra pounds here and there makes a big difference in the long run.

If I'm not warming enough I'm not strong as I should be.

Am warming up with kip to maltese and ordinary crosses

halluites said:

I'm not against warming up but i dont see the big necessity of doing it to perform at a high level and prevent injury. and i got many years experience hard training

If you haven't gotten injured yet from not warming up, you will. Based on my 30+ years in the gym, it is a certainty.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

whats a proper warm up?

There's lots of joint mobility work that you can find on the web, or you can do easier variations of bodyweight exercises, or if you are doing weights then do a few sets of less weight.

dahooligan said:

whats a proper warm up?

One that is made of both short aerobic movement (to raise the heart bpm and make your blood moving in muscles) and light anaerobic ones (to increase awareness and ROM), specific to your needs, and that not fatigue yourself prior of the real training.

Duration from 5 to 20 mins (most gymnasts do 40 min including prehab movements)

Seeing that you really weren't doing gymnastics, I'm not very concerned with what you used to do, Halluites.

I generally use position basics as part of our warmup besides preparing the body to move.

If I bike to the gym, I generally only have to warmup my shoulders and wrists and maybe loosen my spine up a bit on the foam roller and hanging.

How do you feel about 1-2 minutes of jump rope variations as a warm-up. It seems to work all the joints in the arms and legs. I know Bruce Lee was a fan of the rope.

That's good for a general warm up, but specific warm up is important, especially for the disadvantaged movements like planche and FL, etc.

not to imply anything, but how come Pavel is strongly against warm up?

or I misunderstood something?