How to Warm Up Before Lifting Weights to Gain Muscle

Warm-up is like foreplay. It’s not necessary to get the work done, but it makes it feel better.

Training glute bridges with resistance bands. Great for warming up before lifting but also brutal work to do as main training to gain muscle.

WHY warm up before lifting weights?

The principle of a warm-up is simple: get your body ready — and get your mind ready too.

To lift to gain muscle means getting yourself prepared to use a weight heavy enough to challenge your body.

And that is why warming up is the professional way to get ready to train to gain muscle.

There’s the general warm-up before the warmup for lifting weights, where you increase body temperature and get moving. You know the drill, do some pedaling on a stationary bike or go for a short jog.

I personally love the elliptical machine because it is gentle on my knees, I can work at the same time and it involves more of the body than just sitting on a bike.

Then there’s the specific warm-up for lifting weights, where you prepare for the exercise you’re actually going to do.

Let’s say your first exercise is the toughest work of the day. From a priority point of view that is the smartest strategy to use to get the most out of your training. If you want to study muscle hypertrophy from a real scientific approach, check out the extensive work by living legend Brad Schoenfeld, the top dog of muscle science.

Now, back I go to my topic here, stay focused.

Let's use my forever love story in training, the king of exercises the squat.

Squats require effort, technique and focus.

If my working weight is 140 pounds, I might start with 3–4 reps with the empty 45-pound barbell. Then maybe one rep around 120 pounds. Then I start my real working set.

That’s just a rule of thumb not an absolute routine.

The more challenging and technical the exercise is, the more important it is to use the warm-up to set your technique and let your body get used to the load before the real work begins.

If it’s a simple machine exercise, or you’re using a weight where you can do 12–20 reps before reaching fatigue, you might not need the same kind of warm-up, the set you do first serves like it. There is no more a necessity to literally have a separate part of the training block to be 'the warmup'.

Flexing my muscles in 2021. Shot by Pavel Ythjall.

The warmup is not what is the stimulus to gain muscle, and if the sets feel like they're work, then that is probably your current real workout.

Some days, or weeks my warmup is the main workout!

I let myself rest up and be a sissy and do some soft training and it's part of my periodization system, it is how I keep my lifting ability. So do not think I train all out go hard or go home today the way I always trained for about 20 years with no stop.

The warmup you do before lifting weights is supposed to prepare you, not fatigue you. The less work you need to do to get ready for lifting weights to gain muscle, the better.

A typical day warming up to get ready for lifting for me

You can read anywhere about the proper way to warm up, but I'm sharing my way, the real way for me, not another perfect guideline designed by a robot that never trained or had a body in the first place!

PAULINE IN HER TWENTIES WARMING UP FOR LIFTING WEIGHTS

Ha! Warming up? Why do that when I can just go heavy and hard?

My body doesn't need that, my body needs to lift more to gain more.

I wasn't wrong! I didn't need to warm up, my body was young, hungry for muscle and ready to go all out without stop and no end.

I loved training for hours, I didn't want to choose between low reps and high intensity and higher reps and lower intensity, I wanted to do it all all the time, so I did. And it worked.

HOW PAULINE WARMS UP BEFORE LIFTING WEIGHTS TODAY

I always do the general warmup and I do it as part of my regular cardio training. I do that so I don't skip it.

After the general warmup where I spend the time going over my training plan, making sure I have the plan so I don't end up standing there in the middle of the gym without knowing what to do.

Been there, felt that? Yep, it is easy to fall into action paralysis when your plan fails becauase your body can't do what you thought you could do or was going to do.

Welcome to my training life. I KILL ALL EXERCISE DARLINGS.

If it's leg day and my plan includes squats then it is heaven on earth for me. Happy go lucky I am to get to train my favorite exercise.

If I walk into squat day and my body isn’t ready, but I’m not paying attention and go straight into my working weight — BAM. That’s an easy way to strain something because I wasn’t prepared.

That’s why I warm up.

This is why it’s like foreplay for the main training now. It makes the main event, the training to gain muscle so much more enjoyable.

Here is a typical warming up routine I do before lifting weights and doing squats

I Keep it brief. I’m not talking about sitting around doing long stretches between sets. Think about a sprinter warming up before the sprint. I'm preparing myself to perform.

I mobilize with a foam roller. I do my groin and ankle stretches.

I check in with my soft spots -healed up old injured areas - to assure they're in the mood today to train to gain muscle the way I want to train to gain muscle.

Real tips from nearly 3 decades of real training with no quit no stop

I feel stiff in the front of my hips when I start, it goes away with warming up, so you bet I take it as part of fitness life after 40. Not waiting for that day when I feel brand new and again can train like I'm a fitness spring chicken at 21! Ha! Try it out here.

Typical exercises I warm up with before lifting

1. Resistance bands squats, glute clams, fire hydrants and various hip abduction moves, gorilla walk, squat walks, clam walks etc all with resistance bands.

2. Glute clench and glute bridges with resistance bands.

3. For my shoulders, both torn in the past, I do a lot. Here is one great shoulder training warmup with resistance bands to try.

I do those exercises as main routines to gain muscle too, and oh yeah they're brutal! I can't stand the fire I feel in my glutes. I just wanna quit on my sets. Not train like a fitness girl in her 20s, you know? ;-)

HA! That is so funny, I always escaped doing the training that I felt was 'too easy' but apparently I just quit the moment it was uncomfortable! I didn't believe in reps beyond 21. Rolling my eyes ove here and telling my young Pauline "you didn't believe huh? When was fitness a religion and why don't you DO the easy glute work then, you punk!"

Haha. I love young Pauline, I just really don't wanna be like her today when I'm not that young anymore! It's cute and adorable for a while, but no spring chicken should miss out on the life of a real hen! With a rooster mohawk hair do.

Now my fitness life is all the reps from zero reps to 1000 reps. I mean...what's a 1000 REPS 2 DIE, right?

Let's start with a 100 REPS first...4-12-1 BOOM! 4 weeks. 12 workouts. And only one real one goal: seize every training session.

Not just 10 of them. But all of the 12. Now you get me. Do it.

Lift to build muscle

THIS IS THE HARD TRAINING WORK I DO NOW. AND IT IS PAYING OFF.

That brings me to the warm-up I’m doing for 4-12-1 | 100 REPS.

There is a warming up to gain muscle video I call from Zen to Insane in 3 minutes.

This is my way of getting myself from work mode — or from I’m really not interested in training right now — into training mode.

Because if I did pay attention to my mood like many do the way you ask 'am I feeling it?' I'd never go train!

I feel like being fatigued is a state of mind and I know how to override it. Guess how I check myself?

"PAULINE..... IF ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE IF YOU JUST

GO TRAIN TODAY...WOULD YOU SEIZE THE TRAINING DAY?"

That is how I seduce my mind instead of sitting in a meditative state where absolutely no muscle gain will be made.

I have a real warming up to gain muscle mindset routine, you see.

To get pissed, find something to get aggressive about for no reason but to get in the mood to train to gain muscle is the purpose.

I put myself in my little box. Here I am. I’m in the room. I warm up my body. I use my breath. I psych myself up. A little warrior-tantrum style. Do it with me here.

That’s the art of self-motivation.

100 REPS | BUILD MUSCLE is one of my favorite single focus training programs that focus on getting the volume in to gain muscle with focus on one move and adjust the rest periods to train to gain muscle without using heavy weights low reps because your body might just break apart!

So today: DO THE 4-12-1 | 100 REPS warm-up for lower body today and do the one for upper body too.

Seize the Training day. Get yourself ready. Mobilize your hips. Then keep going.

When you watch me laugh like an idiot, and you know this is my daily routine you'll get a good laugh and think oh man, I can't do that, people will think I'm insane.

YEAH , PEOPLE WILL. BUT WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE THINK?

PEOPLE ALWAYS THINK TOO MUCH ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE DO OR DON'T DO TO GAIN MUSCLE.

And laughing is also what I do every morning at 7.50 AM.

I laugh for 10 minutes before I leave bed.

I do this to get in the right mood for my day and stay in a good mood. Being grumpy and sad for a reason is not my choice of mood so I set my mind to the mood I want. Like tuning a piano, I decide and make it happen.

This takes the most work and upkeep, it is harder to stay in a productive, constructive and focused state of mind than it is to stay in shape physically.

Because the mind does not stop chatting and instilling false ideas unless you take control of it and keep control by master your mind. And then, you can master your body....

I only have one day off from my laughter meditation: Sundays.

And I've been doing this ever since I started meditation November 6, 2019.

Then I started daily laughter intervals in November 2022 with commitment to it for life. Never quit.

I needed to stay out of my blue mood and made that my morning warming up routine while jogging in place on those anti-fatigue mats I found were perfect for my home workouts. They did not kill my knees and I love jogging in place!

I was not going to write you a whole book, my bad! So let's cut to the chase and get you to warm up mind and body to gain muscle! Let's go.

-Pauline

I document my real training and share it with my clients. I don't make it look pretty and easy, I keep it real. This isn't Fitness Netflix. Stop scrolling go train. Seize the Training Day.

SEIZE THE TRAINING DAY