- Joined
- Jan 15, 2012
- Messages
- 2,587
Couple months ago I posted above why I thought warm ups were a bit overrated, and a lot of the times counter-productive, since so often guys pyramid up in weight in a manner that fatigues the muscles so that their top set doesn't handle anywhere near the level of weight and reps they could have handled without the fatigue-inducing warm-up.
Lately I've been doing something new.
Before hitting my heavy sets, I warm-up, but without substantive pyramiding. Basically I stay with an extremely light weight, say just ten pounds, and do several sets of high reps, just slowly getting the muscle as pumped as I can, without even remotely fatiguing the muscle from work, as the weight is so light.
Then once the muscle is super pumped, I do a very brief pyramid up, quickly to the max weight, and I'm able to really tax the muscle with near my 1rm in poundage, for sets of 5-10 reps.
Now of course that isn't actually near my TRUE 1rm, but in context you get the idea. Very very heavy weight.
This approach allows me to fully pump the muscle, prime the tendons and ligaments, and hit super heavy weight with intensity, all without the risks and downsides of overtraining, pre-exhausting (in a negative way), chasing the pump with garbage sets that are counterproductive, etc.
Lately I've been doing something new.
Before hitting my heavy sets, I warm-up, but without substantive pyramiding. Basically I stay with an extremely light weight, say just ten pounds, and do several sets of high reps, just slowly getting the muscle as pumped as I can, without even remotely fatiguing the muscle from work, as the weight is so light.
Then once the muscle is super pumped, I do a very brief pyramid up, quickly to the max weight, and I'm able to really tax the muscle with near my 1rm in poundage, for sets of 5-10 reps.
Now of course that isn't actually near my TRUE 1rm, but in context you get the idea. Very very heavy weight.
This approach allows me to fully pump the muscle, prime the tendons and ligaments, and hit super heavy weight with intensity, all without the risks and downsides of overtraining, pre-exhausting (in a negative way), chasing the pump with garbage sets that are counterproductive, etc.