Best Gym Warm Up for Ages 50+

In this episode, Farnham’s leading over-50’s physiotherapist, Will Harlow, reveals the best (science-backed) way to warm up for a gym workout for people over fifty!

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If you’re over 50 and you’re looking for the best gym warm-up routine then I can confidently tell you that walking on the treadmill for 5 minutes before your session is not the right thing to do but don’t worry in this video I’m going to tell you exactly what the best thing to

Do is and how you can do it easily next time you go to the gym if you don’t know who I am my name is will harow and I’m the over 50s specialist physio here at HT physio inum today we’re going to be talking about the best gym warm-up

Routine for people over the age of 50 I’m going to show you the warm-up routine in a moment but before I show you it I just want to note that this is not going to be suitable for everyone if you found a warm-up routine that’s

Better for you by all means stick to it don’t do anything against the advice of your doctor and don’t do anything that causes pain let’s have a look at the warm-up routine now the info in this video is based on a study where researchers compared a number of

Different warm-ups to see which warmup produced the biggest increase in power during the person’s work workout that they did afterwards so they compared the traditional warmup of running on a treadmill or cycling on a bike they compared some stretching types of warm-ups and they also compared the

Specific warmup I’m going to show you in a minute and they found that the key warmup has to do three things the first thing it has to do is it has to Prime the target muscles you’re about to work so if you’re about to do a workout for

Your chest or your back muscles you have to do a warm-up specific for your chest and your back the second thing they found is that it has to introduce you close to the weight that you’re actually going to be lifting in your working set so if you’re going to be lifting weights

Of 20 kilos during your session you need to be lifting close to 20 kg at some point during your warmup in order to warm up the muscle enough to face the challenges you’re just about to put it under and then the third thing it has to

Do is it has to reduce the sensitivity of of the little cells in your muscles that don’t really want to be activated to their absolute maximum if we warm them up properly they become less sensitive and that allows you to get a better stretch on the muscle and it

Means that you can work the muscle a bit harder now they found that running on the treadmill and cycling on the bike does none of these things which is why those types of warmup are not really any good for someone who’s going to come into the gym and lift weights unless

You’re incredibly cold all over before you get into the gym so I would park the cycling on the uh on the bike and running on the treadmill for a bit and do this warmup instead which is scientifically proven to be your best one we call it the

1284 warmup and it’s based on the paper I just mentioned and basically it involves choosing the exact exercise you’re about to do and doing 12 reps eight reps and then four reps of that exercise at a different weight now the exercise I’m going to demonstrate this

In today today is the single arm row and this is one of my favorite exercises it strengthens the back it looks like this you hold onto a bench and you row up with one arm like this holding a dumbbell it works the front of the arm

And it works the back of the shoulder and the entire back on one side now with this exercise I can lift quite a heavy weight when I do it if I went into the gym and I picked up that heavyweight straight away there’s no way I could

Lift it until I was warm so this is the warmup I just to allow me to use uh the heavier weights so what we’re going to do is we’re going to start off by choosing a dumbbell or choosing a weight for our specific exercise that we think

We could lift 30 repetitions of so we want our 30 rep maximum so you want to be lifting a weight here that’s a lot less than the weight you’re going to lift during your workout so for this I’ve got 4 kg like this and if I was R

This I reckon I could do 30 repetitions quite easy so our warm up what we’re going to do we’ve got the 30 rep max weights we’re just going to do 12 repetitions so I’m going to go one 2 3 all the way up to 12 and I’m going

To do quite a nice brisk sort of 1 second up 2 seconds down type movement just to get the muscle activating once I’ve done that I’m going to put the dumbbell down and I’m going to choose a different weight and the next weight I’m going to choose is my 20 repetition

Maximum imum so if I could do 30 repetitions on 4 kilos I reckon I could do 20 repetitions on 7 kilos so I’m going to pick up the 7 kilo weight like this it’s a bit heavier and then this time I’m going to do eight repetitions

So we’re going to go one two so this feels a little bit heavier to me which means that I’m probably moving it a little bit slower I’m paying attention to which muscles I’m using and I’m just going to go to eight repetitions so again this should be quite easy because

I could easily do 20 on this but I’m going to stop at 8 I’m going to put the weight down and I’m going to take probably 30 seconds maybe a minute’s worth of rest just to allow the muscle to kind of wake up a little bit and then

We’re going to move onto our working weight so if I’m going to do a set of eight repetitions I want to get my eight rep max I’m going to find my eight rep max dumbbell and I’m just going to do four repetitions as the last part of my

Warmup so I’m going to go right up to the heaviest weight on here which is 12 which is the whole stack of the dumbbell I’m going to start like this and I’m going to go one 2 3 four and if I’ve chosen the right weight four should be easy but I should

Still feel the muscle having to work and after I’ve done my four I’m going to put the weight weight down I’m going to rest for a minute maybe a minute and a half and then I’m going to do my working set and then I’m going to complete the rest

Of my workout so that is the perfect science-backed warm-up you’re going to do the warm-up routine based on whichever exercise you’re about to do so if you’re going to do squats you’re going to do that routine with squats if you’re going to do deadlifts you’re going to do that routine with deadlifts

And on and on and on now people sometimes ask me do I need to do that for every single exercise I do the answer answer is probably not but if you’re going to do lots of back exercises in a row you might just need

To do the warm up on the first one but if you’re going to do a back exercise then a chest exercise then a shoulders exercise then a legs exercise the answer is probably yes you should do the warm up on each exercise if you’re changing muscle groups with every different

Exercise remember we need the warmup to be specific to the Target muscle so if we’re working different muscles we need to do a different warm-up for each exercise so I hope that answers your questions that’s the perfect science backed warmup if that’s made sense then please give it

A go next time you’re in the gym and see if it helps to increase your output on your working sets so that’s the best gym warm-up routine for people over the age of 50 I hope you found this video useful if you have do drop a comment below and

Let me know your thoughts and if you want to get more from me you can pick up more great tips like this one from my book it’s called thriving Beyond 50 and you can find it on Amazon using the the link below anyway thank you so much for

Watching I appreciate your time and I’ll see you on the next video