WARMING UP OUR GSR APPROACH AND MODIFICATIONS FOR WHEN YOU'RE SHORT ON TIME

Walk around most gym floors and the standard warm-up is a few reps with an empty bar, a couple of arm windmills, maybe a hip swing or two, and a vague sense of readiness. That routine won’t adequately prepare anyone for a heavy squat session, a sprint session, or a loaded march. The empty bar reps can absolutely be part of your warm-up. They just can’t be the whole thing.

We’ve previously written about how to warm up to your working sets using the movement you’re about to perform, from a neural drive and movement pattern point of view. This article covers the step before that: how to get the body moving in the first place. We’ll run through why warming up earns its place in your session, our GSR template, what a gold standard warm-up looks like for different session types, and how to modify it when you’re short on time.

Why Warming Up Matters

The majority of injuries in training are either overuse injuries or acute injuries that occur when we lift too much, run too fast, or perform too many repetitions of a specific movement. The equation underneath both is the same:

Injury = demand on tissue exceeds tissue tolerance

Your warm-up is your first preventative measure against that equation tipping the wrong way. Athletes who performed a warm-up had a 51% lower risk of injury compared to those who did not, and those who performed a sport-specific warm-up had a 41% lower risk compared to those who performed a generic one (Sports Medicine, 2018). Cold tissue tolerates less. Warm, prepared tissue tolerates more. It’s not more complicated than that.

A warm-up also shifts you from whatever state you arrived in, hours at a desk, a day of tasking, just woken up, into a state where you can physically apply yourself. Athletes who warm up report lower stress and anxiety during training and competition than those who don’t (Journal of Physical Therapy Science, 2017). Treat it as the transition between your day and your session.

A complete warm-up should:

• Increase your body temperature.

• Increase your breathing rate, blood flow and oxygen delivery.

• Improve joint mobility, range of motion and joint lubrication.

• Prime your muscles so you’re not moving or lifting cold.

• Increase neuromuscular coordination.

• Focus your mind on the session in front of you.

Coach's Tip: Your warm-up doubles as a daily check-in. If your hips or calves feel notably tight while you move through it, that’s information: an area worth some attention in your daily mobility work, and occasionally an early warning that a niggle is building. Listen to it.

The GSR Template: General, Specific, Ramping

GSR stands for General, Specific and Ramping. It’s our template for structuring warm-ups efficiently, and it applies to any session: gym-based, running, or in the field with nothing but a bergen and bad weather.

General Phase

Raise your body temperature and get your heart rate, breathing and blood flow up. In the gym, 5-10 minutes on a bike or rower, starting slowly and building, does the job. Outside, a brisk walk building into a jog does exactly the same thing. The research points to getting your heart rate to around 55-65% of maximum in this phase, roughly 90-120 beats per minute for most people.

Time here flexes with the conditions. A low-intensity session in a heated gym might need 4-5 minutes. A sprint session outdoors in January needs more. Use this phase to start shifting your head towards the session: what you’re doing, at what intensity, and why.

Specific Phase

Now get more specific and more dynamic. This is where mobilisation work lives: a mobility flow at pace, leg swings, high knees, walking lunges with rotations. You’re warming the muscles further, increasing range of motion and switching on coordination.

Your movement choices here depend on two things: what your body needs to feel ready to train, and what the session actually involves. A pull-up focused session wants your grip, elbows, shoulders and spine prepared. A 4x400m session at near-maximal pace wants your ankles, hips and torso prepared. Same template, different contents.

Spend 5-10 minutes here depending on need, and keep the tempo up. Warming up for ten minutes and then sitting on a bench scrolling while everything cools back down defeats the entire point of the previous phase.

Ramping Phase

This phase ramps your nervous system up to and into your first working set, using the first movement of your session at increasing intensity.

For the 400m session: 3-5 short sprints over 30-50 m, each a little faster than the last, so the first 400 doesn’t hit your body as a surprise. For a weighted pull-up session starting at 3x5: 2-3 warm-up sets of 1-3 reps, adding weight each set, ramping straight into your first working weight. The phase takes 3-10 minutes depending on how intense the session’s starting point is.

It’s normal to want to skip ahead to the main event. But 10-20 minutes of warm-up is a small buy-in for better performance in the session and a meaningfully lower injury risk across the training year. You’ll also usually find your first working sets feel better, which means more quality work per session, which compounds.

Coach's Tip: The ramping sets are not working sets. Keep the reps low and the efforts crisp. If your warm-up sets are generating fatigue, you’ve turned the ramp into a hill you now have to climb before the session even starts.

When You’re Short on Time

If time is tight, compress rather than cut. Around five minutes of general work and five minutes of session-specific mobilisation keeps most of the benefit. Then transition straight into your session with the mentality that your nervous system needs a few sets to catch up: start lighter than programmed and build across the opening sets. The ramping phase hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been folded into the start of your session.

You can also combine the general and specific phases into a single mobility flow performed at a much faster tempo than you’d use for recovery. Moving through the flow briskly raises temperature, heart rate and breathing while simultaneously working the joints through the positions your session is about to demand. Five to ten minutes total, then in.

Common Warm-Up Mistakes

Long static holds before training. Extended static stretching acutely reduces force output, and before a session you want the body ramped up, not calmed down. Keep pre-training work dynamic and save the long holds for after training. We cover this in more detail in our programme structure article.

Warming up, then cooling down in the queue. Ten minutes of good preparation is undone by ten minutes of standing around waiting for a rack while checking your phone. Plan your equipment before you warm up, and if you do get stuck waiting, keep moving.

Copying someone else’s warm-up. The specific phase is specific to you: your restrictions, your niggles, your session. The lad next to you doing ninety seconds of couch stretch has different hips to yours.

Treating set one as the warm-up when it’s programmed as work. If the session says 4x6-8, set one counts. Arrive at it ready.

Applying the GSR Template: Worked Examples

Each example shows the gold standard version and the limited-time version side by side.

Low-rep, squat-emphasised gym strength session

Table 1. GSR applied to a low-rep squat strength session.

Outdoor sprint session

Table 2. GSR applied to an outdoor sprint session.

Higher-rep upper body push/pull superset

Table 3. GSR applied to an upper body push/pull session.

Loaded march / tabbing session

The question we get asked most in this area: do I need to warm up for a tab? Yes, and it’s the easiest warm-up of the lot, because most of it can happen inside the session itself.

Table 4. GSR applied to a loaded march. The ramp lives inside the session: build to pace, don’t start at it.

Coach's Tip: Calves, achilles and the soft tissue of the feet take the biggest early hit under load, and they’re the tissues that respond worst to being loaded cold. If you only have two minutes, spend them on ankles and calves.

Warming Up in the Field and at 0500

The GSR template doesn’t require a single piece of equipment, which is exactly the point. No rower on exercise? A brisk walk or slow jog is your general phase. A fast-tempo flow on any patch of ground is your specific phase. The structure carries over; only the tools change.

Two conditions deserve more respect. Early mornings: you’ve been horizontal for hours, your core temperature is at its daily low and your tissues are stiff, so extend the general phase and expect the first sets or first kilometres to feel worse than they are. And cold weather: everything above applies, plus keep your layers on through the general and specific phases and only strip down as you hit the ramping work. Warming up and then standing in the cold in a T-shirt is just cooling down with extra steps.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a warm-up take?

Gold standard: 10-20 minutes across the three phases, flexing with the intensity of the session and the conditions. Compressed: 5-10 minutes covering general and specific work, with the ramp folded into your opening sets.

Do I need a full GSR warm-up before an easy Zone 2 run?

No. For genuinely easy running, the first 10 minutes at a deliberately gentle pace is the general phase and the ramp in one. If you’ve got known problem areas, ankles, calves, hips, give them a minute or two of dynamic prep first.

Is static stretching before training bad?

Long holds acutely blunt force output, so they don’t belong immediately before training. Short holds matter less than gym folklore suggests, but the simple rule stands: dynamic work before training, longer holds after training or at another point in the day.

Should I warm up before a loaded march?

Yes, but it’s simple: a few minutes of ankle, calf and hip prep, then build to your target pace over the first 10-15 minutes with the load on rather than starting at pace. See Table 4.

What if I lose my equipment between warming up and my first set?

Keep moving while you wait, and when the kit frees up, repeat one or two quick ramping sets before your first working set. Ten minutes of standing around undoes a warm-up; don’t start a heavy set cold because you technically warmed up half an hour ago.

Wrap Up

Given what warming up returns in performance and injury reduction, it should be a fixed component of every session, even the ones you’re squeezing in around a duty. The GSR template makes the decisions for you: raise the temperature, prepare the specific tissues, ramp the nervous system, train.

The mobility flows in the Stoic App slot directly into the specific phase, and every session in the app is built assuming you’ve done the buy-in. If you’re unsure how to warm up for a particular session, message us through the app.

References

The Effects of Warm-up on the Lower Extremity Biomechanics of Jumping Activities: A Systematic Review. Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 2019.

The acute effects of warm-up, static stretching and dynamic stretching on sprinting performance in male team sport athletes. Journal of Human Kinetics, 2013.

The effects of a warm-up protocol on post-exercise oxygen consumption in young adults. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2019.

Effects of warm-up on physical and mental states in female basketball players. Journal of Physical Therapy Science, 2017.

The Effect of Warm-up on the Risk of Injury in Sport: A Systematic Review. Sports Medicine, 2018.

Warm-Up and Performance in Competitive Swimming. Sports Medicine, 2018.

The effect of different warm-up stretching protocols on 20-metre sprint performance in trained rugby union players. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2010.

The effects of different warm-up protocols on knee proprioception in male team sport athletes. Physical Therapy in Sport, 2012.