The Stronger By Science Podcast · StrongerByScience.com

Warming-Up to Build Muscle

·1 hr 11 min·4 clips

A heavy single at 93% of max improved AMRAP performance after an extensive warm-up.

Pac and Milo open the episode just the two of them. They joke through the start, including Alexa accidentally playing "Just the Two of Us," before settling into part two of the warm-up follow-up. The first detour is a fresh preprint. They briefly touch on a study by Wolf and colleagues on range of motion versus lengthened partials in trained individuals. After that, they return to the question that actually anchors the episode: what does the warm-up literature say about performance in hypertrophy training? The treatment is basically a quasi systematic review, because there has not been a recent systematic review on warm-ups for this area in quite a while. They note that only about six studies have come out over the past three or four years, which is enough to be interesting but not enough to settle everything. The most recent paper they cite is Viveros and colleagues' 2024 study, "High Load and Low Volume Warm-Up Increases Performance in a Resistance Training Session." In that design, participants warmed up with five reps at 80% of max, ten reps at 60%, or fifteen reps at 40%. They then performed three sets to failure on the bench press, lat pulldown, or leg press. The heavier warm-up performed best. The middle and lighter warm-ups were similar to each other. The hosts connect that pattern to the broader post-activation performance enhancement idea, where something in the 70 to 90 percent range often seems to help before the main work. They point out that this looks closer to a heavy approach than to a long, airy warm-up full of extra reps. A 2020 study by Ribeiro and colleagues comes up next. They use it as another example of the field testing different warm-up approaches on common lifts like the squat and bench press. The episode keeps moving between the study details and the practical takeaway for serious lifters. By the end, Pac and Milo land on a simple but qualified idea: warm-ups matter, heavier ones often look better for performance, and the evidence still leaves room for preference and context. The discussion stays practical and skeptical rather than pretending the topic is more settled than it is. It closes by emphasizing that the goal is understanding what evidence exists, and what it still does not fully answer.

As heard by us

Pac and Milo treat warm-ups as a training choice with evidence behind it, while keeping one modest caveat in view about the limited research base.

Pac and Milo frame this warm-up follow-up around a practical question: what pre-lift setup is most likely to support better performance in later training sets?

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Why you'd press play

Warm-up advice with the lab coat left at the door.

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