Begin with the End in Mind: Warm-up Protocol for Barbell Lifts

• 
  Sarah Walls, CSCS

  SAPT's Elite Athlete Remote Care: https://t.co/pKcpdhpNHv via @YouTube

  Nov 7, 2018, 4:51 PM

Often I witness athletes spending upwards of 15-minutes dedicated to their non-barbell warm-up; this includes initial mobility, SMR, general dynamic, etc. Only to make a beeline for the squat rack and load up some weight to get to work. With this approach, yes, you could get hurt - although I’d say that’s unlikely - but what you’ll definitely get yourself is poor CNS readiness, an un-grooved pattern for the session, and a shitty training day.

Personally, unless I’m experiencing a sudden limit in mobility or extreme soreness, I will forgo that style general warm-up in favor of shooting hoops for 5-10-min. For advanced athletes, it's really all about knowing your body. Regardless of the approach, once the general phase has been completed it’s time to get into the specific warm-up for the day and get primed for an awesome session.

It probably goes without saying, but this protocol is only applicable when using barbell lifts. It’s pretty simple, but many people rush the barbell warm up sets. I assume this is because they don’t know how to properly hit their needed repetitions without overdoing it. So, they’re afraid of going into their work sets pre fatigued from too many warm up sets. But, they blow it by not getting in enough and end up starting their work sets with he CNS still trying to get on the same page as your brain.

So, one of the most important benefits of a warm up is the CNS activation/excitement. Usually, you hear the benefits being blood flow, extra GPP, technique work, etc. but in this case the goal is to get everything firing fast and strong.

You want to feel GREAT going into that first work set.

In fact, you want to be chomping at the bit to crush weight. Teetering on the edge of freaking out if you don’t get started. That is CNS excitement. That readiness. 

This is how your should feel when properly warmed up.

Here is a standard warm-up protocol I like to use with athletes - percentages are based off of weight to be used during work sets:

bar x10 (ALWAYS - if you think you’re too advanced for a bar warmup, then that proves to me you’re not; so re-categorize yourself as intermediate, at best, and add in that bb set)

50% x 10

70% x 5-8

80% x 3-5

90% x 1-3

Truth-be-told, this is a very subjective process. Reps need to be dictated by how the athlete is feeling in that moment. If they are struggling to get in the groove, then they should be pushed to hit the higher rep number on each warm-up until their body finally reaches a point of CNS excitability. 

On the other hand, if they’re ready to get moving, then I prefer to have them go through the minimum to keep them focused on the work sets.

You can (and I have) argued in favor of the opposite approach for both examples, but this would be my default approach.

If the athlete you’re working with is too immature to make these calls on their own, then err on the side of the higher volume warm-up. 

Incredible ❤️

Euro Step‼️ I love they paired this with @izzy_b99 Euro Step 💪💪 #Repost @washwizards (@get_repost) ・・・ Improve your Euro step with these exercises! 💶🐾 #WizWellness @medstarhealth

Guys, I’ve never been more surprised than when @hollylivefox5 asked my kids to come out to hop on our backs for push-ups this morning on live television! I thought she was kidding... she was not. It was a fun time chatting with @wisdommartintveee and Holly about keeping things rolling for the fam at home, @saptstrength , the championship with @washmystics and how my first season with the @washwizards is going. Thanks all! #arabellaviolet #dukefredrick #Repost @wisdommartintveee (@get_repost) ・・・ Push ups with @strengthboss @hollylivefox5 #gooddaydc

Awesome surprise to come home to!!

Champions!

WNBA Finals for 2 years in a row... This is what that feels like. #runitback #getintheweightroom

Improve Core Control to Improve Performance, Reduce Injury

Improving performance in athletes is often made to be very complex and hard to understand. So when in doubt, my approach is to measure it. Whatever "it" is. As much as I try to get measurements on every factor of athletes as I possibly can, there are still those outliers who defy science and theory and my best efforts to measure them.

For example, the athlete who works tirelessly - doing exactly what his/her coach prescribes; nothing more and nothing less, but with full mental engagement (vs. going through the motions) and yet can’t budge in a certain category. Oh well, must be “genetics” is often the response from the field.

Or, the insanely gifted athlete who follows 55% of the advice given, eats absolute crap 92% of the time, doesn’t get enough sleep, and still improves at every measurable on earth. Oh well, must be “genetics”...

I haven't researched or proven what I'm about to discuss, so this is based on my own observations of watching thousands of athletes move and perform over the course of thousands upon thousands of hours.

I think an individual's ability to quickly turn on their core is at the heart of the performance improvement holy grail. 

Over time I've noticed that there is a relationship between high performance and one’s ability to fire a strong core very fast. I’ve also noticed that there may be a similar relationship that exists between injuries: fire fast, fewer injuries OR fire slow and get hurt.

It is well accepted that you need to brace your core during heavy lifts to not have energy leaks; lack of bracing during heavy lifts can also cause form breakdown. But how do we train the ability to fire the core? To fully engage it in a fraction of a second?

Great question, glad I thought of it, let’s find out:

Medicine Ball drills with catch off the wall

A partner can work for this too, but the speed off the wall trumps what you get from a partner: a wall doesn’t need time to react.

"Hot Ground" jump variations 

Olympic weightlifting (the catch, specifically)

Hybrid exercises that combine multiplanar jumps and catches/throws 

Again, these are just ideas, but I think it's something worth exploring for efficacy.

Training Log from 2nd Pregnancy

A couple months ago a friend suggested I spend some time on Wendler's 5/3/1 Boring But Big program. It is simple and fairly fast for me to get through. The fast part was the most important factor at the time.

I'd done it before so I knew I had the template somewhere on my computer. Turns out, 5/3/1 was what I did during my entire pregnancy with my son. Honestly, it was pretty cool to review. 

It looks like the program started at 20-weeks; I genuinely have no idea what I was doing prior to this program. Lifting, obviously, but I didn't log it.

I do remember pretty clearly the goals with writing this plan. I was trying to take my experience from my first pregnancy and become a little smarter and more effective. With my daughter (born in 2010), I had trained through that too, but was pretty shy about my strength training (per the usual doctor recommendations about "light weights and high reps"). I also ran for my aerobic conditioning, which caused very bad plantar fasciitis - this was a very bad decision on my part. Very bad.

With Mom v. Baby Training Round II, my goals were to prioritize my aerobic training but not resurrect the plantar fasciitis by stupid exercise selection. A side bar: aerobic training during pregnancy has HOOOOGE benefits for both the mom and, more importantly, the baby: better stress management, lower birth weight (I had no interest in birthing a baby the size of a Thanksgiving turkey), improved cognitive development from birth to age 5, plus some others I'm forgetting right now.

I also wanted to stay strong with my body weight exercises. There were a lot of pull-ups and pushups in this plan.

Lastly, I carried the mantra of "Winning" the pregnancy - this meant: healthy baby, quick delivery, and hit my recommended weight gain (no more and no less). 

Okay, before you take a look at the actual plans below. Let me give you a "key" to reading it:

1. I did not do the 5/3/1 standard of an all out rep max on the last set; I'd just do as many as I could until I got up to an RPE of, let's say, an 8
2. You'll see in the 2nd-4th waves that each week is written as 25/5, 26/6, etc. This was to remind me how many weeks pregnant I was (the first number) and where I was in this 16-week training plan
3. I did pull-ups and pushups twice a week with a repetition total equal to the number of weeks in the pregnancy I was; probably would have been much kinder to myself to do a countdown here, but that may not have occurred to me as a smart choice
4. Same deal with the prowler pushers - 1 trip for every week; truth be told this was really a borderline choice, I wouldn't do this again
5. You'll see I put in some very light interval runs in the last wave; I think at this point I was just so big and winded and uncomfortable all the time that I wanted something else to do besides push the prowler

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Squatting was too uncomfortable for me, by the end of the 2nd wave, so I pulled those out and subbed in more deadlift variations.

This program is now 4-years old and looking back at it I can say I would use this approach again (minus the idiotic volume of Prowler pushes).

Did I hit my goals? I sure did. Duke was and is super healthy with a birthweight lower than mine at birth (so, I effectively controlled the turkey factor). I gained exactly 25 pounds. The delivery was quite fast and my recovery very fast (especially with regards to how quickly my uterus returned to normal size.... I believe this was from the training).

While I would never suggest this program be used by anyone other than me, it proved that challenging the conventional wisdom of physical training during pregnancy is okay when there is an established training history and the mother and fetus are healthy.