The Best 5-Minute Warm-Up to Do Before a Strength Workout
When life is crazy and you're insanely busy (so like, all day every day), it's tempting to jump right into your workout to maximize the time you've got. But when you skip a warm-up and just go from 0 to 60, you're setting your body up to be less efficient—and potentially end up with an injury.
"Exercising without a warm-up is a huge no-no," Danielle Burrell, a NASM-certified personal trainer and founding trainer at Rumble Boxing, tells SELF. "When you are performing strength-training exercises, your muscles shorten and lengthen, and if they aren't warm or 'prepped,' your muscles are more prone to tear and pull," she says.
Aubrey Watts, C.S.C.S., performance center coordinator and assistant strength coach at the National Strength and Conditioning Association, tells SELF that the key components of a warm-up are "increasing the body’s core temperature, mobility, muscle activation, and technical build-up." By increasing the body's temperature, you loosen the tissues around your joints, increasing their range of motion. Better flexibility does two things: allows your body to move better through the motions of your workout and helps to protect you from injury.
"Incorporating mobility will help reduce the risk of injury and help the body utilize the correct muscles for certain movements and prep them for power production," Watts explains. "The technical build-up piece is to introduce the body to complex movements at a simple level first." For example, you'd maybe warm-up with some squats to prep your body for squat jumps later in the actual workout.
So what's a time-crunched gal to do? The truth is, you really only need five minutes to get in a good warm-up. You just have to stop looking at it as taking away from your workout, but rather, recognize that it's helping you better maximize the minimal time you've got.
Watts notes that a good warm-up should be specific to the range of motion you need for that particular workout. "So if you are about to do an upper-body lifting session, you may want to spend more time on priming your shoulders and thoracic spine (upper back) and activating your core and glutes. In contrast, if you are about to go for a run or do some sprinting intervals, you may want to prime your hips and ankles and activate the glutes as well."
There's a huge variety of warm-up exercises you can do, so we asked Burrell—who models the exercises below—to put together a great, go-to 5-minute warm-up you can use before most strength-training sessions. "This is my go-to warm-up because it wakes up every muscle that I am going to use for my strength training workout," she says. She also suggests foam-rolling before any of this to help release any existing tension or soreness in the muscles.
- 8 inward hip rotations, 8 outward hip rotations (each side)
- 8 forward arm circles, 8 backward arm circles
- 2 minutes jumping rope
- 8 walk-outs
- 12 deep reverse lunge to knee raise
- 12 deep reverse lunge to knee raise
- 15 squats with a 10-rep pulse at the end