Before I get into the meat of this, I want to give just a little background. I have been working on my conditioning and my legs have been pretty beat. I have been scaling back a bit on my volume and have pared down the intensity of my conditioning to combat it. With that, I also decided to take a closer look at my warmup.
As with many, my warmup can start off pretty simple. Then my dumb ass is walking around the gym getting full of brilliant ideas. Maybe a little more single leg work would be good. Am I doing enough posterior chain. More facepulls more gooder. Blah, blah, blah.
I started thinking it's no wonder why my legs are tired. I'm nearly 52 and have just shy of 37 years of damn hard training under my belt. I do a lot of things right, but there's only so much I can recover from.
So in my attempt to do less, I have ditched my warmup. For the past three weeks, I have been going straight to the bar. Now on the bench, I started with 12.5 per side versus the usual 25. For the deadlift, I have 10lb bumpers and went with that before adding any more weight. I usually start with 45 on my belt squat but went with 25. With these, I didn't do a sh!t ton of reps either, I just kept my weight jumps smaller.
I have to tell you. I'm very happy with my results thus far. The hope was that my legs would feel more recovered, which they do. The bonus is that my lifting feels even better as well.
Let's face it, my training exercises are not that complicated (yours probably aren't either unless you are an oly lifter). And considering I have been squatting, deadlifting, and benching for nearly four decades, I think I have the movement patterns down by now
Mind you, I have been stretching and doing soft tissue work religiously for over a solid year. I'm sure for some the only soft tissue work or stretching, at least dynamically, would be during their warmup. I wouldn't recommend dropping it if that is the case for you.
I'm not going to begin telling any of you experienced or inexperienced lifters if your results would be the same. It's just something to think about.
