The Best Warm-Up You Can Do In 10 Minutes

I really appreciate your kind words and encouragement!

I’m so glad you see how much thought and refinement has been put into these sequences so they have a great flow, make sense and compliment your workouts.

Wish you much success in your training.

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I’m glad you’re curious to give my wam-up sequences a try.

I like to tell people, “Don’t trust me, test me.”

Once you test these out for yourself, I’m confident you’ll integrate these sequences or your own version them because I’ve seen for over a decade how many clients and athletes and trainers have found these sequences to be game-changers for them.

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Thanks man!

I can definitely see the “refinement” and the years that went into the sequences. I’ve been a fan of yours for awhile, it’s cool to be able to say Hi.

Thank you for taking the time to reply….I find your articles both informative and for me personally always have practical application…it’s very much appreciated x

Hey @Nick_Tumminello I appreciate your respense and apologise for the strawman, that was out of line and entirely my fault

My concerns over drawn out muscle-activation focussed warm-ups are as follows:

  1. Mechanisms of “muscle activation” are nebuluous at best. Are we raising cortical excitability of primary motor neurons, are we creating nuoplastic changes in the pre-motor areas? To my knowledge, we don’t know yet. Without a plausible mechanism, Im concerned that athlete’s reporting feeling better after these sessions could simply be down to psychosocial factors such as ceremonial effects and self-fulfilling prophecy.
  2. Principles of motor control state that the sensorimotor system organises itself, through multiple levels of control (cortical, supraspinal reflex, spinal reflex, tone) in a way that is specific to the task, individual and environmental traits at that point in time. Muscle activation rarely, if ever, matches the task or environmental constraints of the outcome movement, and therefore cannot be a “donor” motor pattern. This comes back to point 1) about there being a lack of plausible mechanisms for this type of training.
  3. Based on the references you supplied, PAP could be the answer (4) given the 8min delay before a performamce benefit was seen. However, from what I’ve seen from the PAP research is that the PAP effect is sporadic and hard to guarantee. In addition, if muscle activation is only working by potentiating the system, why not “potentiate” with the task itself.
  4. I’m yet to see studies which provide a sham condition for muscle activation. For example having a no activation group (control), a glute activation group (treatment) and adductor/hip flexor group (sham). In health research, sham conditions are important to detangle physiologic effects of an intervention from psychosocial effects referred to in 3)

Therefore, I personally struggle to justify the A (and if we’re being honest, the M) component in the RAMP protocol. I usually approach the warm-up with the simple objective of “do the damn thing”

That is some wisdom right there!

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I’m grateful for your support, and I hope I can continue to earn your respect with my future works.

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I’m so glad my work has been helpful and useful to you.
I hope you continue to feel that way about my future works. I’ll work hard to make sure it does.

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My man, you’re clearly a well-adjusted person who is humble, self-reflective and a critical thinker.

I admire that, and am very encouraged to see how much thought you put into what you do and what you say. I wish more trainers and fitness enthusiasts shared your disposition because we’d have way less ego and dogma is they did.

In regards to your thoughtful comments; I’ll take it a step further. In that, there’s not much about warm-ups that we can say we can justify having strong opinions on from a research perspective.

In that, the research in general isn’t extensive, and much isn’t of great quality. And, it shows that many approaches work.

In such cases where the scientific evidence isn’t compelling, or is equivocal, we default to principles and professional experiences from different groups of people, which one is afforded if they’re lucky enough to be a coach for years and work with a wide variety of populations.

With the above in mind, I’d never claim or tell anyone that they “must” do a specific type of warm-up because any such claim is unjustifiable if one seeks to be honest.

In fact, here is a paragraph that I had originally included in this article, but it was edited out of the published version:

“I get that athletes and lifters from prior generations were just fine without using these warm-up techniques. So, I’m not saying they magic or that you have to do them. In fact, there are lots of ways to effectively warm-up. I’m simply explaining why I use the warm-up techniques in the article for you to decide if they’re also right for you.”

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Appreciate the honesty and kind words mate :slight_smile:

I completely agree that in absence of clear research, principles and professional experience must take its place. I actually don’t read a lot of sport/exercise science literature because it rarely provides actionable, useful findings.

I guess the follow-up discussion point for me (if you’re up to it) is: when principles and experience are in conflict with one another, how do you reconcile the two?

Personally, I fall back on my principles, or find ways to modify my principles if necessary (a hard, uncomfortable process as I’m sure you’ll know)

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Hi, I’m Digging the back and forth discussion here and like what you’ve suggested as a warm up format Nick even though I’m not 100% onboard with this specific w/u. I find a 5-7 min round on a rowing machine and then a short burst of mobility drills geared towards the training regime for the day provides great results and is simple to follow.

One thing that jumped out here though and got me to comment is that you say you never tell anyone they must do a specific type of warm-up yet I feel that the article title of “The Best Warm-Up You Can Do In 10 Minutes” is in conflict with that.

Maybe it’s just an editorial thing (like you’ve mentioned with a few other parts that got cut out), but I think that may form part of the concerns that j4gga2 might have had, as did I. Too often in media attention grabbing headlines get used that can colour the readers perception of the article to be different than what was intended. This may be something that T Nation staff could consider in the future.

I followed the site for a while and definitely appreciate the shift to including a healthy dose of real science and qualified experts such as yourself that’s happened over the past several years.

Cheers!

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