Thursday, October 11, 2012

How to Warm Up Before Weight Training - To Prevent Injuries and Increase Strength


Warming up correctly before a workout is essential to avoid injuries and to help you prepare mentally and physically. If you don't warm up sufficiently you could wound up with a nasty muscle tear and this can leave you out of the gym for a few months. So take the time to heat up for a few minutes before every heavy workout, your body will thank you for it. This article will show you the optimum warm up for a heavy muscle building workout.

There are two parts to the best warm up: the aerobic/cardio warm up and the warming up sets.

Cardio

This is a slow and steady way to get the blood flowing through the muscles and to warm up your body. This should be a good 5-10 minutes of gentle cardio. Things like running on the treadmill, the cycling or the rowing machine are great ways to warm up your body and get the blood flowing.

Once you have completed this you should feel warmed up, you joints should be lubricated and your muscles flowing with fresh blood.

Warming up sets

This is the most important part of the warm up. This will what will both mentally and physically prepare your body for the heavy workout ahead. You should take the biggest lift from your workout that day. Then perform warm up sets using this lift.

To perform warm up sets your will do 5 sets of lower amounts of weight compared to the weight you will be using for the workout:

Set 1: 10 reps of 50% of the workout weight

Set 2: 8 reps of 60% of the workout weight

Set 3: 6 reps of 70% of the workout weight

Set 4: 3 reps of 80% of the workout weight

Set 5: 1 reps of 90% of the workout weight

These sets should be quite easy to complete and gradually get a bit harder each time, while decreasing in lifting time. These will fully prepare your muscles for the exercises ahead. If you are doing legs for one day, you would choose the squats as your warm up sets. Then once you have completed the warm up you can go into a proper set of full weighted squats, after this you won't need any more warming up, you can then complete all the other exercises.

If you are performing a full body workout it is probably best to do a few warming up sets for the main body parts, like the legs, chest and back.




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