Jumping straight into your working weight might feel efficient, but warming up properly pays off in both performance and injury prevention. The catch: if you log warm-up sets the same way as working sets, your records stop reflecting what you actually did when you look back later.
What warm-up sets are for
Warm-ups serve two main purposes. First, they gradually prepare your muscles, joints, and nervous system for the working weight, lowering injury risk. Second, they let you rehearse your form and build focus, setting you up to perform your best on the sets that actually count.
How many sets, and how heavy
There's no single right answer, but a common approach is starting around 40–60% of your working weight and stepping up over 2–4 sets. For a 100kg working set, that might look like: empty bar × 10, 60kg × 5, 80kg × 3, 95kg × 1 — then straight into your working sets.
Heavier exercises and ones that stress the joints more deserve a more thorough warm-up progression. Lighter or isolation exercises can usually get away with a shorter one.
Why they shouldn't count toward your working volume
Warm-up sets are lighter and contribute far less to fatigue than working sets. Treating them the same in your logs and totals creates a few problems:
- Your total volume gets inflated, so you can't accurately gauge how much real work you did
- Lighter warm-up sets can slip into your target-achievement count
- When you check "last time," a warm-up weight can show up in place of your real working weight, making it useless as a reference
For this reason, it's worth clearly separating warm-up sets from working sets, and excluding warm-ups from totals and achievement checks.
A practical way to log it
The simplest approach is to tag warm-up sets with a marker — like a "W" — so you can tell them apart later. That keeps your working volume and target-achievement checks accurate, while still preserving the fact that you warmed up at all (which can be a useful data point on its own when reviewing how your form or readiness felt that day).
Guessing whether a set was a warm-up based on weight alone sounds convenient, but it's unreliable in practice — some days you genuinely work a lighter weight as your actual working set. A manual toggle avoids that kind of misclassification.
Related articles
- What Is RPE? How to Use It in Strength Training
- What Is Progressive Overload? The Basic Principle Behind Every Gain
In LiFTY, you can mark any set as a warm-up with a single "W" tap. Warm-up sets are automatically excluded from target-achievement checks and volume totals, so your working records stay accurate. No account needed to start right away.
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