Why The Warm Up Is Crucial

Warming up a muscle group prior to training it is essential for two main reasons. The first being injury prevention, loading a muscle with a heavy weight when it hasn’t been warmed up is dangerous as it creates a much higher risk of injury. Secondly, warming up correctly will also drastically improve the efficiency of the muscles and therefore improve the performance of your training session.

General Chest Warm Up Exercises

The exercises in this list are general warm up exercises, this means that they will effectively warm up the muscles of the pectoral's for training. It also means that they do not move through the specific movement pattern that is being performed during the training session.

Specific Chest Warm Up Exercises

A specific chest warm up would typically be a regression of the exercise you are going to perform during your training session. For example, if you are performing a ring press up in your training session you would want to perform a set or two of press ups prior to performing the ring press up. This more specific warm up would be performed after the general warm up exercise. In this article I am not going to be providing examples of these as they are specific to the exercise at hand.

How I Design My Warm Ups

Personally I do not love spending a long time warming up, this isn’t because I do not think its important it is because I am usually pressed for time. To warm up effectively but also efficiently I use a mixture of general and specific warm ups in a circuit. In the example below I am warming up for a session where the primary exercise is the bench press. In the first round I would perform the bench press with an empty bar and then with 50% of my max in the second round. This warm up takes a total of 5 minutes.

2 Rounds

— General Chest Warm Up

— Specific Chest Warm Up

— Anterior Core Exercise

Try These 9 Chest Warm Up Exercise To Prep For Your Pectoral Training