The warm-up ramp: arrive at your top set ready, not tired
Sample video: in the live course this plays the full walkthrough.
There are two warm-ups in most gyms and neither one works. The first is no warm-up: straight to the working weight, first set always the worst set, and a strange decision about whether that counts. The second is a twenty-minute production of light sets and high reps that leaves you tired before the real work starts.
A warm-up is a rehearsal. Its whole job is to get you to your working weight having already practised the movement at increasing loads, without spending anything you need for the sets that matter. Get it right and your first working set feels like your third one. That is the difference the ramp makes.
The shape of a good ramp
A ramp goes up in weight and down in reps. That combination is the point: the light rungs are for groove and blood flow, so they can afford a few reps. The heavy rungs are for the nervous system to meet the load, so they want two or three reps at most. If your last warm-up set is eight reps at a heavy weight, that was not a warm-up, that was a working set you did by accident.
A common ladder runs at roughly 40, 55, 70 and 85 percent of your working weight, for five, five, three and two reps, with the empty bar before all of it. That is a convention rather than a law. Heavier lifts often want one more rung near the top; light accessory work usually needs none at all.
Three rules that matter more than the percentages
- Never take a warm-up set to failure. Not close to it either. The moment a warm-up gets hard it has stopped warming you up and started using you up.
- Keep the rest short at the bottom, longer at the top. Thirty seconds after the empty bar is plenty. Two minutes before your first working set is not indulgent, it is the difference between a good top set and a mediocre one.
- Ramp only the first lift of the session. By the time you get to your second and third movements you are already warm. One or two build-up sets is all they need.
If your warm-up runs past about ten minutes for one lift, it is too long. Count the sets, not the minutes: the empty bar plus three or four rungs covers almost everything. And if you are still finding your groove on the last rung, the answer is a lighter working weight this week, not another five warm-up sets.
Work out your own ramp
The awkward part is not the idea, it is the arithmetic. Eighty-five percent of 187 pounds is not a weight you can build, and doing that sum four times while somebody waits for the rack is how people give up and just load the bar. So the course includes a calculator that does it for you, and shows the plates for each rung so you are not counting in your head.
Course tool
Warm-up ramp and plate calculator
Type the weight you want your working sets at. It lays out the warm-up ladder underneath it, and the plates that go on each side.
185lb
Empty bar, 4 warm-up sets, then 3 working sets.
45 lb bar plus 70 lb a side is 185 lb. Exactly what you typed.
| Set | Weight | Reps | Per side |
|---|---|---|---|
| Empty bar | 45 lb | 10 | just the bar |
| Warm-up 1 | 70 lb | 5 | 10, 2.5 |
| Warm-up 2 | 100 lb | 5 | 25, 2.5 |
| Warm-up 3 | 125 lb | 3 | 35, 5 |
| Warm-up 4 | 155 lb | 2 | 45, 10 |
| Working set 1 | 185 lb | your reps | 45, 25 |
| Working set 2 | 185 lb | your reps | 45, 25 |
| Working set 3 | 185 lb | your reps | 45, 25 |
The warm-up is not training, it is a rehearsal. Each rung is heavier and shorter than the last, so you reach your working weight having practised the movement rather than having already spent it.
- Everything rounds down. If the exact percentage is not loadable, it drops to the next real weight, so the tool never prints a number you cannot build.
- The ladder is a common gym convention, not a rule. Heavier lifts often want an extra rung; light ones want fewer.
- It does not decide how heavy to go or how many reps to do. That comes from your program, and from the lessons in this module.
- Switching between pounds and kilos starts you on that unit's standard bar and plates rather than converting your number, so nothing drifts by a rounding.
- Bands, chains, specialty bars, and collar weight are not modelled.
Write your ramp on the back of your hand or in your log, once, and then stop thinking about it. A warm-up should be the least interesting part of your session. Get it right and it disappears, and every top set from here on starts from the same place.
The warm-up ramp & plate chart (PDF), included with the live course