Why Warm-Ups Matter: Preparation, Not a Second Workout

There are two common warm-ups. The first is five minutes on a bike while scrolling, followed by the first working set. The second is twenty-five minutes of mobility drills, band work, activation exercises and foam rolling, after which the actual training begins in a state of mild fatigue.

Both miss the point. A warm-up is a preparation, which means it has a job with a defined end: raise tissue temperature, restore the ranges the session needs, wake up the nervous system, and rehearse the movements you are about to load. When those four things are done, it is finished. Anything more is training you did not plan for.

Here is what is actually happening, and how to build one that takes about twelve minutes.

What warming up changes

Temperature first. Raising muscle temperature by a degree or two speeds up the enzymatic reactions behind energy production, improves the rate at which muscle fibres shorten, increases nerve conduction velocity, and makes connective tissue more compliant. Warm muscle produces more force at a given speed than cold muscle. This is not folklore; it is measurable.

Circulatory changes follow: blood is redistributed toward working muscle, capillaries open, and the oxygen delivery system moves from resting mode to working mode. Start hard from cold and your cardiovascular system spends the first minutes catching up, which is why the first interval always feels disproportionately awful.

Then the nervous system. Coordination is a skill, and skills are recruited faster after rehearsal. This is why the third set of a lift often feels better than the first even though you are more tired — the pattern has been recalled.

And finally, attention. A warm-up is the transition from being a person with a phone to being a person who is training. That is not a soft benefit; distracted lifting is how people get hurt.

The static stretching mistake

For decades, warming up meant sitting on the floor holding stretches. The evidence has moved. Prolonged static stretching immediately before an effort can transiently reduce force and power output, particularly with long holds. The effect is modest and short-lived, but it is the opposite of what a warm-up is for.

This does not make stretching bad. It makes it badly timed. Long holds belong after training, in a separate session, or on rest days, when improved range is the goal and nothing needs to be lifted afterwards.

What belongs before training is movement: controlled, progressive, taking joints through range under your own muscular control rather than holding them at end range passively.

RAMP: a structure that works

Coaches use a simple four-part framework. It is easy to remember and hard to get wrong.

• Raise. Five minutes of easy continuous movement — brisk walking, easy rowing, skipping — to lift heart rate, breathing and tissue temperature. You should be warm and lightly breathing, not tired.
• Activate. Two or three minutes waking the muscles the session depends on. Glute bridges before squatting, band pull-aparts before pressing, calf and foot work before running.
• Mobilise. Two or three minutes moving the relevant joints dynamically through the range the session needs: hip circles, deep lunges with rotation, thoracic openers, arm swings.
• Potentiate. Three or four minutes of progressively harder rehearsal — the actual movement, light, then heavier. Empty bar, then half load, then near working weight. For running, a few strides. For boxing, shadow rounds.

Twelve to fifteen minutes, and every part earns its place.

Different sessions, different warm-ups

The principle is constant, the content is not.

Before heavy lifting, the potentiation phase matters most: several ramping sets of the exact lift. Before running, spend longer on the raise phase and finish with short accelerations. Before trail walking in heat, keep it brief — the terrain and climate will warm you within minutes, and a long warm-up simply adds heat load. Before boxing or anything with fast changes of direction, spend more time on mobility and coordination, because the demands are chaotic and the joints need range in every direction.

Early morning training needs a longer warm-up than evening training. Body temperature is lowest in the early hours and tissues are stiffer; ten minutes at 6am is not the same as ten minutes at 6pm.

How to know it worked

The test is subjective and reliable: at the end of a good warm-up, you should feel more capable than when you started — warm, alert, slightly springy, breathing easily. If you feel tired, you trained. If you feel exactly the same as when you walked in, you did not warm up; you passed time.

Cold, stiff, jetlagged or under-slept, extend it. On a day when everything already feels loose, shorten it. The warm-up serves the session, not the other way around.

Preparation built into the day

The programme being designed for Phoenix Oasis places warm-ups deliberately rather than leaving them to chance — a structured preparation before each strength or conditioning session, adjusted for the heat and for the fact that the site's own terrain does part of the work. The land near Rivera, in Huila, Colombia, climbs; the walk to a training platform is already a raise phase.

The retreat will open on 30 June 2028. Until then, twelve minutes of RAMP works in any gym, on any morning. You can read how the training days are taking shape in the planned retreats.