Garage Gym Workout: Olympic Lifts as a Warm Up
In this blog post I’m going to go through my typical warm up routine. As I’ve gotten older, warming up has become more and more important for me to prevent injury and have a more effective workout. Long gone are the days in my 20’s when I could just start lifting with minimal warm up or mobility work. I’m currently 44 years old, and I’ve learned that an effective warm up is as important as the workout itself. I’ve also learned warming up the muscles isn't enough, I need to work on my joint mobility as well. We live in a society where we are constantly sitting so hip mobility is absolutely crucial. In his book Deskbound, Dr. Kelly Starrett refers to all the sitting, inactivity, and lack of sleep that we encounter in modern society as “innocuous environmental load” (pg 11). These are the seemingly “innocuous” things can cause damage to the body. So there is a need to undo all the damage sitting is doing to the body. Ironically, sitting for an extended period of time is how I began to think critically about my warm up. About eight years ago I had gone through a life threatening illness and spent several months sitting a lot because I couldn’t do much else while I was recovering. Sitting for hours on end without moving day after day, month after month took a serious toll on my body. That’s when I began to prioritize hip mobility while incorporating more dynamic movements.
Over time I’ve come up with a warm up routine that incorporates very light Olympic lifts, specifically the snatch. In addition, I also incorporate an overhead squat and deadlift movement as well. Of course this isn’t novel, Crossfit has been using PVC pipe warm ups for years. In addition, I also recently saw a video of Dan John doing something very similar to what I do to warm up, here is the link to that video: Dan John - My Favorite Warm Up. Dan John is a living legend in strength and conditioning so I figure if I’ve landed in roughly the same place as him on my own then I must be on the right track. This warm up has evolved over several years into what it is today. Disclaimer: This is what I do and what works for me, not advice for you. If you shouldn’t be working out or doing these movements then don’t do them. To quote popular Youtuber Mark Lewis: “I’m not your doctor or your mother, so use your best judgment.”
I block off the first 10 min in the gym for my warm up session. I begin with hip and shoulder mobility movements before I get into the overhead squats and snatches. I started doing these when I was recovering from the illness/surgery I referred to earlier and just never stopped. I spent the better part of a year sitting, so this was the daily routine I found that helped me get a lot of my hip mobility back. I complete three rounds of the following:
20 Air Squats
10 Leg Swings (I hold onto a squat rack upright and swing my leg front to back)
10 Leg Side Raises (I hold onto a squat rack and raise my leg up to the side)
Next is shoulder mobility with Dynamic Arm Swings. This is pretty basic as well, I start flat footed and swing my arms back, then forward and up over my head while simultaneously going up on my toes so my body is fully extended from from my feet to my arms up over my head. The key for me on this one is getting a good stretch at the top of the Swinging Arms movement. I treat this movement almost as a snatch. I complete three rounds of the following while holding a 2.5 lbs weight:
5 Front Circles, 5 Back Circles (One arm at a time)
10 Dynamic Arm Swing (I swing my arms from back behind my body to up over my head, stretching my arms at the top)
5 Side Raises, 5 Front Raises
Now I’m ready for my Olympic Lift warm up, which is the snatch bookended with deadlifts and overhead squats. I perform these movements with a 6 ft steel plumbers pipe that I got at Home Depot. It weighs about 5 or 6 lbs. The weight of the pipe is important. The problem with PVC is there is no weight to it, so it doesn’t provide the same stimulus and tension. Conversely, using an empty barbell is too heavy for the purposes of this warmup, at least for me. Also, I incorporate a dead hang from the pull up bar which is really important since it provides a good stretch, and decompresses my lower back. In addition, it allows all the blood circulating from the warmup to get into those tight muscle fibers. As I said before this is very similar to a recent Dan John warm up routine, which is interesting because I came up with this independently before I knew he was doing something similar. And it indicates to me that I am on to something with this warmup. So here is the rep scheme, I complete three rounds of the following:
3 Deadlifts
3 Snatches
3 Overhead Squats
10-30 second Dead Hang from a Pull Up Bar
By the time I finish this workout I’m breathing a little harder, my heart rate is elevated, and I’ve got a little leg pump. I’m not exhausted, I’m just warmed up, and I can usually jump into my main workout a little faster. Sometimes I’ll do three rounds of Power Cleans followed by Clean & Jerk in lieu of the Snatches and Overhead Squats to add variety to the warm up. I’ve been doing this version more frequently recently. For purposes of warming up, I never increase the load from the pipe because it’s the movement not the weight that is important. Also, sometimes this can be my workout if it’s a rest day. I’ve also used this warm up as my workout when I was recovering from an injury or illness to get me back in the groove of working out. Over a few weeks I can build up additional work capacity and continue on with other exercises in my workout. It has been a really great recovery workout for me along with the stationary bike.
Additionally, there have been time when I just grabbed a barbell and some plates and did this routine for my actual workout. It is a really great workout for rounds of EMOM or whatever. I’ve actually been considering going back to incorporating the barbell Olympic lifts back into my workout routine after a long hiatus and this work out is probably where I’ll start. On a side note, I found Kelly Starrett’s aforementioned book Deskbound really interesting as it takes a deep dive on the ill effects of sitting and has tons of mobility exercises. Anyway, I hope this insight on my warm up was interesting. Thanks for reading, and remember new strength starts on Day1.
