Hey CT,
I’m going to run the Best Damn Program this summer since it’ll fit my overall lifestyle better than the longer strength-focused sessions I’ve been doing the past couple years.
My question is regarding warmups for the 4 lifts. I know we’re supposed to keep volume low with 3 work sets, the final being an all out effort. Is it okay to do a lighter set or two to “grease the groove”? I’m more concerned with isolation type lifts rather than the compounds - I think those always warrant a few warmup sets.
As always, thanks!
Are you saying that isolation exercises require more warm up???
When you say it like that… nah definitely not 
I find sometimes I have a hard time feeling a muscle I’m targeting work. I think it’s because I’ve stuck to primarily the big compound movements until recently so my mind-muscle connection isn’t the greatest.
Do your warm-ups on isolation exercises with a “flex style” … slow movements (like 3 sec up and 3 sec down) focusing on flexing the muscle as hard as you can, not on moving the weight.
You can also try isodynamic contast: hold the weight at the point of greatest muscle tension for 15-20 seconds (flexing the muscle hard) THEN doing your reps
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Thanks for that! I tried both methods at my last workout with good success. The “flex style” helped me fire up my tri’s and pecs really well.
I went with the isodynamic method for delts - I think they’re the group I have the most trouble with so as I built fatigue during the iso portion I was able to feel them much better.
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Not sure if this is better treated as a new question…
Hi Christian,
For the sake of being completely explicit, does the article spell out all the reps for each session–two “prep” sets, and an all-out set?
Does the article assume that we’re doing warm-up sets, as the OP here seems to indicate? If so, could you spell out your recommendations here, maybe especially for number of warm-up sets?
I’m going in for day 3 today, and I put in a few to a bunch warm up sets for some of the exercises (mostly the bigger ones), and days 1 and 2 took longer than I expected for workouts intended to be “short”, so I’m suspecting that I’m adding more warmup than you had in mind, if you were expecting any at all…
I mostly have experience so far with the StrongLifts and Starting Strength programs, and the latter has an app that recommends approximately 5 warmup sets for 3 working sets of squats, for instance.
Thanks!
=> Shadowhawk
New question = new thread please