Do not waste your warmups
Using my warm-ups to work on capacities I don’t usually have time for in my regular strength training sessions has been one of the best things I started doing last year. Progressing in hand balancing is a tough task, and it still occupies the majority of my training time. However, my interest in other disciplines hasn’t waned, and I became frustrated trying to cram all the capacities I want to work on into the limited time I have for strength sessions.
The idea of using my warm-ups to actually focus on capacities I’m trying to improve has helped a lot with this issue.
Traditionally, the warm-up consists of two sections:
The general warm-up: This is meant to increase your heart rate and prepare your body for the session ahead. Typically, this is aerobic in nature.
A sport-specific warm-up: This part prepares you for the specific demands of the activity you’re warming up for. It can include mobility work to access the ranges needed for the session, or lighter skill work to prepare your coordination and tissues for the movements you’re about to do.
The change I made is in the general part of the warm-up. As someone motivated by long-term goals, I often find it easy to half-ass light aerobic work, which doesn’t lead to significant adaptation. Instead, I decided to omit the usual general warm-up and use that time to work on capacities I might otherwise neglect during my regular strength sessions.
Since only about a third of my training is focused on strength, most of my warm-ups happen outside the gym. Therefore, the capacities I work on during warm-ups require minimal equipment.
Out of the things I’ve tried, here are a few that have worked especially well for me:
Trying to levitate before my handstand session.
Power or elastic-based qualities: These are by far my favorite. One big benefit of doing them before skill work is the alertness they bring. I feel more awake after just 2-3 good sets of jumping compared to 8-10 minutes of mindless aerobic exercise. Plyometrics and jumping are also easy to overdo, as the decline in performance after too many sets is harder to measure objectively than a regular strength exercise. Limiting the time spent on them to 15-20 min in the warmup solves this problem for me.
Because of the explosive nature of these movements, they typically don’t have high mobility demands, meaning I don’t need a long time to get ready for my first working sets either.
Here’s a quick video with an example plyometric session you could do as a warmup.Core work: Most of my strength training consists of compound movements, and I like to keep my core fresh for those. That’s why, like most people, I typically program core work at the end of my strength sessions. This also makes it easy to skip on tired days. By placing core work at the start of my skill or handstand sessions, I’ve solved this problem. A few hard sets of core work are more than enough to get me warm. And since handstands require very little core strength, this doesn’t interfere with the session ahead.
Then, there are things I didn’t like as much:
Other skill work: I tried dedicating 15 minutes at the start of my session to improve my juggling. Although it seemed like a good idea initially, I quickly realized it wasn’t ideal for my warm-up for a few reasons. First, once the initial "juggling newbie gains" wore off, I stopped improving. I feel like most skill work requires 10-20 minutes of practice before you can push your limits, and there’s just not enough time to have a quality session during a short warm-up. It also didn’t get me warm enough to skip the general warm-up, making the whole session unnecessarily long. I shouldn’t have been surprised, as I’ve seen the bodyweight fitness community get underwhelming results from 10-minute handstand warm-ups before strength training.
Anything that gives me a pump, other than core work: Quick isolation exercises are easy to do before a training session; they don’t completely tire you out and can get your heart rate up sufficiently. Some people also enjoy the feeling and appearance of pumped muscles. However, I found that this makes my body feel too different and interferes with my skill work.
More power makes backflips more fun
Although my new warm-up strategy has its downsides, it’s been a net positive for me, and I will continue to experiment with it. I plan to make some quick warm-up protocol videos for you to try out and encourage you to experiment yourself! I bet that using this method, you can give one or two qualities you’ve been neglecting the attention they deserve.
