Warm-up sets can be used to add volume to your workouts by doing several warm-up sets with lighter weights. Warm-up sets can also be used to add low volume load to your workouts by doing low rep warm-up sets while working up to a single rep with 80% to 85% of your single rep max. Whether adding volume or load to your workout, you can gradually increase the poundages of your warm-up sets over time to complement the strength building stimulus created by your work-sets. For examples of how to to set up your warm up sets to accomplish these things, refer to the following two links which will take you to the previous two articles concerning warm up sets:
How to use Warm up Sets To Add Volume To Your Workouts
How to use Warm up Sets to emphasize Load
You can also use a variety of angles, motions, and ranges of motion in order to strengthen your muscles from all angles when warming up a muscle group. This last technique that deals with exercise variety while performing warm-up sets will be the focus of this article.
Squats
One of my favorite warm-up exercises for squats is to start with a couple of sets of goblet squats or straddle squats. When warming up with these exercises, make sure to use a light weight and squat as deep as possible in order to create a deep stretch. This will loosen up your knees, hips, and back before doing regular barbell squats. You can do some of the reps while sitting back as far as possible to warm-up your glutes and hamstrings. Follow this by doing some reps where you stay upright and let your knees track forward as far as possible to hit the muscles around your knees. I must emphasize that you should only do this last variation for your knees with a very light weight consisting of only ten pounds. As your knees grow stronger and more comfortable with the exercise, you can gradually add weight. Goblet squats or straddle squats can also be done with a very wide stance with your toes pointed out in order to stretch and strengthen the inner thigh muscles.
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Even regular barbell squats can be done in a variety of ways as they can be performed with a narrow, medium, or wide stance, and they can be performed with an upright stance, or by bending forward at the hips at various angles while keeping your spine straight. By using a variety of squat positions, you will hit your knees, hips, quads, hamstrings, and back muscles in different ways.
Bench Presses
When warming up for bench presses, you can start with light dumbbells and go for a very deep stretch. You can also do a variety of bench press variations simply by changing the spacing of your hands and by lowering the bar to different locations ranging from your lower-chest, or mid-chest, or upper-chest. Not only can you practice lowering the bar to different areas of your chest, you can practice lifting the bar straight over the lower chest to build triceps, or you can lift the bar over your face to build front delts.
Back Exercises
Warm-up exercises for back muscles can be performed with a variety of hand spacing. Another way to add to variety is to hold your upper body at different angles when doing lat pulldowns. You can position your upper-body straight up and down, or you can lean back at different angles. If you have access to a suspension strap or a TRX suspension strap, it is a wonderful piece of equipment that allows you to train your back muscles from all kinds of different angles.
There was a time when I always did my warm-up sets with the exact same form that I would use for my work-sets. However, I will be hitting 60 years of age in about 18 months, and I have found that my body holds up better and responds better if I train it from all angles. It will feel very awkward at first when you use an exercise variation that you are not familiar with, and you must start with light weights that are less than 30% of your single rep max. However, as you continue to practice each exercise variation, your joints and muscles will begin to adapt and get stronger in ways that would never happen if you do your exercises the same way all of the time.
If you need to include more variety in your workouts, don’t assume that the only way to do it is by adding variety to your work-sets, as your warm-up sets provide an excellent opportunity to include exercise variation in your workouts. Best of training to you.
Related Resources
Bench Press Warm-up
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Squat Warm-up