Max Out or Workout Out?
When I was a new lifter, I made a lot of mistakes. I now teach high school weight training to 15-18 year old kids. I witness many mistakes every day and every year. One of my goals when teaching this class is to help correct those mistakes and lead these young men and women down a more efficient path towards strength and muscular gains. This morning I watched two young men walk into the weight room and immediately put on their max weight on a bench press. No warm up, no nothing. Just max weight. This is a mistake… a big mistake, especially if you want to actually make progress.
First, always warm up. Many serious, big time lifters who bench press and squat in excess of 500 lbs. warm up with just the barbell. Whether you are preparing for a workout or a max effort, you will greatly benefit from warming up with lighter weight. Warming up will increase performance by increased blood flow to the muscles being used and increasing activation of the nervous system (because strength is highly correlated to neuromuscular activation).
After watching one of the students attempt a max effort bench press 30 seconds after walking in the gym, use lighter weight and complete 8 solid reps with excellent technique I told him that looked great and that was much better than trying to max out right away. His response was but I wouldn’t be able to max out after I did a set like this. I went on to explain to him the following, which is the point of this article: What is the difference between preparing for a workout or a max effort attempt?
Let’s assume your max bench press is 185 lbs. I would suggest you warm up prior to a max bench attempt something like this:
Set 1: barbell (45 lbs) x 10 with 1 minute rest
Set 2: 95 lbs x 4-6 reps with 1 minute rest
Set 3: 135 lbs x 2-3 reps with 2-3 minute rest
Set 4: 170 lbs. X 1 rep with 5 minute rest
Set 5: 190 lbs. X 1 rep
This can be manipulated based on personal preference if you like more or less warm up sets but in general this is a good game plan. Remember, exercise is a science and an art. Understanding the individual and preferences has a big impact because we are dealing with people, not robots. Psychology also plays a large role in performance.
You should also be aware that maxing out is not and should not be a typical workout. Maxing out should be performed after a period of time where you trained for weeks working to increase size and strength. Then after those weeks of training, you max out again to see exactly what progress was made.
There are a million different workout protocols and programming options but for the sake of this article, I also want to give an example of how an individual should progress through warm up sets to get to the working sets of an exercise.
When warming up to workout, I would suggest something like this:
Warm up set 1: barbell (45 lbs) x 10 with 1 minute rest
Warm up set 2: 95 lbs x 4-6 reps with 1 minute rest
Working sets 3-5: 135 lbs x 8-10 reps with 1-2 minute rest
As you can see, there are similarities to the warmup protocol for maxing out but you do not need to work up to quite as heavy a weight. Your goal is to get a feel of the movement with lighter weight, increase the blood flow to the muscles used, active and prepare the nervous system for the task at hand, and increase the weight while decreasing the reps for each set to keep fatigue to a minimum so that as much energy can be used during the working sets. It is a mistake to overdue warming up because it takes away from the working sets which is where most of your progress will be made.
I hope you find this useful and will implement proper warm up sets when performing your workouts in the future.
