How many warm-up sets before a heavy lift?

The number you are usually given is two to four sets, ramped by percentages of your working weight or of your one repetition maximum. It is a reasonable convention. It is not a finding, and the difference matters if you have ever wondered whether you were doing it wrong.

A narrative review of warming up for resistance training put it plainly: there is still little agreement on what the best warm-up for strength performance is¹. The studies that exist mostly compare a warm-up against no warm-up, or one protocol against one other, inside a single session. Nobody has run the experiment that would tell you whether three sets beat two.

What is established

Two things are. The first is that a warm-up specific to the lift, meaning lighter sets of the movement you are about to do, is worth doing. The second is that the load in those sets is the part doing the work.

Trained men were put through three sets of six squats and bench presses at eighty per cent of their one repetition maximum, after one of three warm-ups. In the squat, six reps at eighty per cent of the training load produced higher bar velocity in the second and third working sets than the same six reps at forty per cent. In the bench press, the progressive warm-up, light and then heavy, produced more total work than the light one on its own².

A warm-up set is a rehearsal. Rehearse the thing you are about to do, not a lighter thing that resembles it.

Why the percentage ladders let you down

The usual instruction is a ladder: half your working weight, then three quarters, then ninety per cent. Two things go wrong with it in a real gym.

The first is that a percentage of a one repetition maximum needs you to know your one repetition maximum. Most people who lift do not, and testing one in order to warm up on a Tuesday is not a trade anybody should make.

The second is that percentages produce weights your equipment cannot be set to. Half of an eighty two and a half kilogram squat is not a number the bar can make. A pin stack has fixed steps. A dumbbell rack jumps. A machine carriage weighs something before you load a single plate onto it, so a percentage of the working load can come out lighter than the empty machine.

So the ladder gets rounded, in the gym, under a bar, by somebody who only wanted to warm up. It gets rounded to whatever is quick, and quick is not always close enough to the working weight to have been worth the set.

What to do instead

1. Ramp on the lift itself. Five minutes on a bike raises your temperature. It does not rehearse a squat.
2. Make the last rung close to the working weight. That is the set that is doing the preparing. Everything under it is getting you there.
3. Keep it short. Its job is to prepare you, and every rep spent on it is a rep you do not have for the sets that count. The heavier the rung, the fewer reps it needs.
4. Do not ramp everything. The first heavy compound lift of the session is what you are cold for. By the time you reach a cable movement for the same muscles, you are not cold any more.

What Reckoner does

Reckoner builds the ramp for you, out of two things: the weight you are actually about to lift, and what that lift's own equipment can actually be set to. So the rungs are loads that exist on your bar, your rack or your stack, rather than percentages you have to round in your head under the bar.

It rebuilds them whenever the working weight moves, which is every time the engine adds weight and every time you edit a load yourself. A ramp built for last week's weight is the failure this whole page is about. It looks like a warm-up and it is a set of something else.

Warm-up sets count toward nothing. The engine never progresses one and never reads one back, so a ramp cannot flatter your week. And if you do not want them, you can turn them off, or keep them only on the first lift of the day.