How many warm-up sets do you need?

For heavy compound lifts, 2–5 progressive warm-up sets are often sensible. How many you really need depends more on your working weight, the exercise, how you feel that day and the training that came before than on a fixed number. The goal is preparation without meaningful fatigue.

Do you have to warm up on the treadmill before strength training?

No. A short general warm-up can be pleasant and raises body temperature, but it is not mandatory. For performance on heavy strength exercises, specific preparation with the actual lift is what matters most.

Is stretching before strength training useful?

Short static stretching is not inherently a problem. Long static stretching immediately before strength or power performance can reduce performance in the short term; with short stretch durations inside a complete warm-up, the effects are usually small. Dynamic mobility is a good option when you need it for the movement that follows.

Warm-Up Sets in Strength Training: The Optimal Warm-Up Protocol

A good warm-up should prepare you for your working set.

Not tire you out. Not occupy you for ten minutes. And not deliver a magic insurance policy against injury.

For strength training that mainly means: run through the movement that is about to get heavy with lighter loads first.

How many warm-up sets you need for that depends on the working weight and the exercise. A set of lateral raises with 8 kg needs different preparation from a squat with 160 kg.

So the best warm-up is not a rigid ritual but a simple principle: from general to specific, from light to heavy — with as little additional fatigue as possible.

What a warm-up should achieve in strength training

Warm-ups are often justified by injury prevention. The evidence for that is less clear-cut than it often sounds.

Systematic reviews of sports warm-ups do show signs of a lower injury risk with certain neuromuscular programs. But for a specific strength training protocol like “five minutes on the bike plus three warm-up sets”, there is no solid guarantee that it prevents injuries.

The performance side is far clearer: specific warm-up strategies can improve subsequent strength and power performance.

So a warm-up in strength training has four practical jobs:

Raise body temperature and circulation, if you arrive cold or inactive.
Make available the range of motion you need for the exercise.
Rehearse the movement pattern and setup before the load gets high.
Lead you up to your working weight in stages, without accumulating fatigue beforehand.

For heavy compound lifts, the fourth point is usually the most important.

General and specific warm-ups are not the same thing

General warm-up

This includes things like:

bike
treadmill
rowing ergometer
easy full-body movement

That can make sense if you have just got out of the car, you are cold, or you simply feel better after a few minutes of movement.

But you do not have to turn it into a cardio session of its own.

Three to five minutes of easy movement is a practical start for many — not because exactly that duration is scientifically prescribed, but because it does its job without meaningfully fatiguing you.

If you already feel warm and mobile, you can start straight with the specific preparation.

Specific warm-up

Here you use the exercise itself, or a very similar movement.

Before squats: squats.

Before bench press: bench press.

Before deadlifts: deadlifts or a technically very close variation.

These sets give you the information an ergometer cannot:

How does the movement feel under load today?

What happens physiologically during a warm-up

Muscle temperature rises

As muscle temperature rises, nerve conduction, enzyme activity and the mechanical properties of the tissue all change, among other things. Classic work by Bergh and Ekblom shows that muscle temperature and short-term performance are related.

That is one reason why the first heavy set often feels better after a few preparatory minutes than “cold”.

The nervous system gets a specific stimulus

A heavy squat is not just muscular work. You have to unrack the bar, build tension, coordinate the movement and produce force in the right position.

Specific warm-up sets rehearse exactly that task at a lower load.

A 2025/2026 scoping review on warm-ups in strength training reports, among other things, better 1RM performance, higher movement velocity and more reps after appropriately dosed specific warm-ups.

You calibrate your readiness for the day

For practical purposes this is almost more important than any theory.

If 70 % of your planned working weight is unusually slow today, you find that out before the heavy set.

If everything feels explosive and stable, likewise.

So warm-up sets double as a quick readiness check.

Potentiation can help — but is not mandatory

Heavier preloading can, under certain conditions, briefly improve subsequent explosive or strength performance. The term commonly used for this today is post-activation performance enhancement (PAPE).

But that does not mean everyone needs a heavy single at 90–95 % before their working set.

A preparation set that is too heavy can just as easily create additional fatigue. The right point depends on the exercise, your training level and the goal of the session.

The basic principle: weight up, reps down

A practical warm-up for heavy compounds usually follows this pattern:

Range	Typical reps	Purpose
very light	5–10	movement and setup
light–moderate	3–5	taking on load
moderate–heavy	2–3	approaching the working weight
near the working weight	1–2	the final step on heavy sets

These are orientation, not mandatory values.

The decisive idea is:

The closer you get to your working weight, the fewer reps you need.

That raises specificity while keeping fatigue low.

Example: squat — working set 100 kg × 5

One possible ramp could look like this:

Set	Weight	Share of working weight	Reps	Rest
1	20 kg	20 %	8–10	short
2	40 kg	40 %	5	45–60 s
3	60 kg	60 %	3	60–90 s
4	80 kg	80 %	2	90–120 s
5	90 kg	90 %	1	90–120 s
→	100 kg	100 %	5	—

That is deliberately less volume than a scheme with 8 reps at 40 %, 5 at 60 %, 3 at 80 % and further singles.

A warm-up should prepare the work — not already consume a meaningful part of your training volume.

If 100 kg is not a particularly heavy working weight for you, or you have already done a similar lower-body exercise, four or even three warm-up sets can be enough.

Example: bench press — working set 80 kg × 5

Set	Weight	Share of working weight	Reps	Rest
1	20 kg	25 %	8–10	short
2	40 kg	50 %	5	45–60 s
3	60 kg	75 %	2–3	60–90 s
4	70 kg	88 %	1	90 s
→	80 kg	100 %	5	—

Here too, 70 kg × 1 is no magic “bridging set”.

If you already feel perfectly prepared after 60 kg, the 70 kg set can go. If your working set were a heavy triple or single, on the other hand, an additional intermediate step could make sense.

Example: deadlift — working set 140 kg × 5

Set	Weight	Share of working weight	Reps	Rest
1	60 kg	43 %	5	45–60 s
2	80 kg	57 %	3	60 s
3	100 kg	71 %	2	60–90 s
4	120 kg	86 %	1	90–120 s
5	130 kg	93 %	1	90–120 s
→	140 kg	100 %	5	—

On the conventional deadlift, an empty barbell is often impractical, because small plates put the bar lower than its normal starting position.

If you want to practise technique with very little weight, bumper plates, elevated blocks or a light bar at standard height make more sense than forcing yourself to start “with 20 kg”.

How many warm-up sets do you really need?

It is not the body weight on the bar alone that decides.

More important are:

How heavy is the working set relative to your capacity?
Is it the first big exercise of the day?
How complex is the movement?
How warm are you already?
How mobile do you feel today?
Is the working set a set of ten or a heavy single?

As practical orientation:

Situation	Often sensible
light isolation after several exercises	0–1 warm-up set
moderate machine/dumbbell exercise	1–2
heavy compound lift	3–5
very heavy single / high absolute load	4–6 with low reps

This is not a scientific threshold table either. It just translates the ramping principle into a usable decision.

Isolation exercises: does every lift have to start from zero again?

No.

If you have already done bench press and overhead press, you normally do not need five stages up to your working weight before triceps pushdowns.

A light orientation set can still make sense when:

the exercise feels unfamiliar today
you are using a very high working weight
you want to ease a joint into the movement
the isolation exercise is your first of the day

The question is not:

“Does this exercise require a warm-up set by rule?”

It is:

“Am I already prepared for exactly this load?”

Three warm-up mistakes that genuinely matter

1. Turning the warm-up into a workout

If you are already doing long sets at 70–80 % of your working weight, you create fatigue exactly where you do not need it yet.

A simple check: warm-up sets should feel clearly easier than your working sets. If a preparation set already lands at RPE 7, it is usually too long or too heavy for a normal ramp.

2. Using a fixed protocol regardless of the working set

100 kg × 10 and 100 kg × 1 are both “100 kg working weight”, but they do not demand the same preparation.

The higher the relative intensity and the more demanding the movement, the more sensible small load steps and single reps near the working weight become.

3. Banning static stretching across the board

Here the old fitness rule is too coarse.

A systematic review by Behm et al. found small performance decrements on average after static stretching. But the dose was decisive: long stretch durations of 60 seconds or more per muscle group were considerably more likely to be a problem than short stretches.

Newer reviews also show that short static stretching inside a complete warm-up affects subsequent strength and power performance only trivially.

So you do not have to banish static stretching on principle.

If you only reach a position after briefly stretching a particular muscle, that can make sense. For a classic strength warm-up, dynamic mobility is often simply more practical, because it prepares range of motion and active control at the same time.

Incidentally: strength training itself can improve mobility, especially when you train movements under control through large ranges of motion.

A simple warm-up protocol for practice

For your first heavy compound lift you can start like this:

Optionally move generally for 3–5 minutes, if you are cold or stiff.
Add only the mobility work you actually need for the exercise.
Do 5–10 clean reps of the target movement with a very light weight.
Increase across 2–4 further stages, while the reps drop to 5, 3, 2 and possibly 1.
Rest enough before your first working set, so your warm-up does not bring fatigue with it.

On your second big exercise you often need fewer stages, because your body is already warm.

Calculating warm-up sets automatically

Warm-up sets are simple — the mental arithmetic beforehand is not always.

60 % of 107.5 kg. Then round sensibly. Then 75 %. Then work out which plates go on the bar.

In hitPR you can have warm-up sets generated to match your working weight and then break the weights down into plates directly with the plate calculator.

The advantage is not that an app knows a universally “optimal” warm-up.

It just takes the routine work off your hands. The final decision stays the same: do you feel prepared after these sets, without already being tired?

Conclusion

The best warm-up in strength training is not a rigid five-set recipe.

It follows a principle:

general warm-up only as much as needed
prepare mobility only where the exercise lacks it
warm up the target movement specifically
raise the weight in stages
reduce reps as the load rises
create no meaningful fatigue before your working sets

Specific warm-ups have good evidence behind them for subsequent strength performance. On injury risk we should be more careful: a warm-up is sensible preparation, but not a scientifically established shield against every injury.

Your working set should feel heavy. Your warm-up should not.

Sources

Bergh U, Ekblom B (1979). Influence of muscle temperature on maximal muscle strength and power output in human skeletal muscles. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, 107(1):33–37.
Bishop D (2003). Warm Up I: Potential Mechanisms and the Effects of Passive Warm Up on Exercise Performance. Sports Medicine, 33(6):439–454.
Fradkin AJ, Gabbe BJ, Cameron PA (2006). Does warming up prevent injury in sport? The evidence from randomised controlled trials? Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 9(3):214–220.
Fradkin AJ, Zazryn TR, Smoliga JM (2010). Effects of Warming-up on Physical Performance: A Systematic Review With Meta-analysis. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 24(1):140–148.
Behm DG, Blazevich AJ, Kay AD, McHugh M (2016). Acute effects of muscle stretching on physical performance, range of motion, and injury incidence in healthy active individuals: a systematic review. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 41(1):1–11.
Chaabene H et al. (2019). Acute Effects of Static Stretching on Muscle Strength and Power: An Attempt to Clarify Previous Caveats. Frontiers in Physiology, 10:1468.
Neves PP, Marques DL, Neiva HP, Alves AR (2026). Acute Effects of Resistance Training Warm-Up and Re-Warm-Up on Dynamic Strength Performance: A Scoping Review. Journal of Science in Sport and Exercise.

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