Over more than a decade of daily workouts, I’ve learned how important an effective workout is to having a productive day. My morning workout sets the tone for my day. It can give me a boost of energy and dopamine that fuels my best work and creativity.
One crucial element for an effective workout is an effective warm-up.
Just as the workout sets the tone for your day, the warm-up sets the tone for your workout. An ineffective warm-up doesn’t just sabotage your workout; it can also set your day off on the wrong foot.
What Makes a Warm-up Effective
An effective warm-up combines general readiness — getting the body online — with specific activation of the movement patterns you’ll be doing.
It helps regulate the nervous system and primes the system to adapt to increasing stressors.
3 Common Mistakes With Warm-Ups That Sabotage Your Workout
Over a decade plus of daily workouts, I’ve made many mistakes in how I approach my workout that have inadvertently sabotaged my intentions. Here are three common mistakes I’ve made over the years.
(1) Activating Specific Patterns Before a Systems Check
One common mistake we make in warm-ups is confusing readiness with activation.
This confusion results in two different types of mistakes. The first is getting directly into specific activation movements before the body is “online.”
In a house, you can’t turn on the oven and the lights until you’ve confirmed that the electrical wiring is solid.
If the boiler isn’t working, you won’t be able to turn on the shower and the water won’t be hot. If the thermostat is broken, you won’t be able to adjust the temperature.
Your body is like a house, and the same principle applies. Before you attempt to activate muscles or movement patterns, it’s important to make sure the system is “online” and responsive.
Beware of skipping the general to focus on the specific too soon.
(2) Overdoing Systems Prep and Skipping Activation
The other mistake that emerges from the confusion between systems readiness and activation is overloading the general warm-up at the expense of the specific.
You don’t need to turn on all the faucets in the house to use one shower. If you’re in one room, you don’t need lights on in the rest of the house.
A certain amount of general warm-up will prime your nervous system, but too much will fatigue your system without giving you the specific prep you need.
Five minutes of cardio before strength training helps increase your body temperature and get your blood flowing. A half hour might leave you too fatigued to build real strength.
Similarly, random movements that “work your legs” are less effective for squats than practicing squats.
Beware of overdoing the general at the expense of the specific.
(3) Overloading Electrical Circuits
Just like a house can handle only a certain amount of electrical current at once before the circuit shorts, your body can also handle only a certain amount of load at once.
The nervous system is highly adaptable, but will shut down if you overload it too fast. The body adapts best to a layered approach that slowly loads the system and gives it time to adapt.
If you’re prepping for a weightlifting session, start with bodyweight movements, build to resistance bands, then do the movement with light weights or an empty barbell before you load the bar.
This approach is important even if you’re just doing mobility work or stretching: rather than pushing into a deep stretch, do a modified version or scale back the depth before going further.
Through repetition, the body grooves the neural pathways of the movement, which facilitates its adaptation to increased load.
Beware of pushing too hard too soon.
A Good Beginning is Half the Task
How you start sets the tone. An effective warm-up doesn’t only prime your body for your workout; it primes your system for everything else you’re going to do that day.
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