3 Warm-Up Hacks To Skyrocket Your Strength

The "why" of warming up is well established in research and in the trenches. It helps to turn on the muscles you're about to use and reduces the chance of injury. But if you're using your warm-ups solely to "get loose," you're probably wasting valuable minutes and missing out on the potential for surprisingly huge gains.

Depending on your level of training, these warm-up tricks can help maximize gym time and improve overall strength and performance.

Overshoot Your Working Set

A classic strength-building hack is to ramp up your low-rep sets beyond your working weight. When you come back down to your working weight, it'll feel like a feather!

Example: Let's say you're building up to 3 working sets of 5 reps in the bench press, a classic strength-and-size protocol I talk about in my article "A Better Way To Deload."

• Do a few low-weight ramp-up sets.
• Now, do singles at 90-95 percent of your max. Don't shoot for a PR here—this is a warm-up, so you don't want to kill yourself...

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