A three-stage system to build core stability, mobility and power before you even start lifting

A warm-up has one job: make the workout that follows better. Yet plenty of people manage to defeat the purpose before they touch their first working weight. They spend 10 or 15 minutes doing cardio, follow it with an extended stretching session, add a collection of corrective exercises, activation drills and foam rolling, and eventually arrive at the actual workout already carrying a little fatigue. At the other extreme is the lifter who walks into the gym, loads the bar and considers the first working set the warm-up. Neither approach makes much sense.

I wrote an entire book, The Warm-Up: Modern Methods for Strength Training, around this problem. The central message then is still the central message now: the goal of a proper warm-up is to improve performance, not induce fatigue.

The science has evolved since that book was published, and some of the old stretching dogma has deservedly become more nuanced. But the larger principle has held up extremely well. A productive warm-up should increase readiness, rehearse the movements you are about to perform, improve usable range of motion and prepare the nervous system without consuming the physical resources you need for the workout itself. Contemporary research continues to support dynamic preparation and progressive resistance warm-ups for improving aspects of strength, velocity and power.

Over the years, I have refined that philosophy into a simple three-stage system: STABILIZE → MOBILIZE → POTENTIATE. From there, you transition into specific warm-up sets for your first major lift. It covers a lot of ground in very little time, and that is precisely the point.

STAGE 1: STABILIZE

Before creating a lot of movement, I want control. That is why my warm-up now begins with a modified McGill circuit. After dealing with my own lower-back problems and revisiting the work of spinal biomechanist Dr. Stuart McGill, this became a staple before serious lifting. One clarification is important: this is not static stretching. The McGill Big 3 are primarily trunk-stability exercises involving short isometric contractions. Their purpose is to establish stiffness and control around the spine, not to passively lengthen tissue.

I start with a few gentle Cat-Camel cycles. McGill describes this type of movement as motion rather than stretching: you are taking the spine comfortably through flexion and extension without aggressively forcing the end ranges. From there, I move into the core work.

For the Bird-Dog, perform 6 repetitions per side with approximately a 10-second hold on each repetition. Maintain a neutral spine, make a fist with the extended hand and drive the opposite heel away from you. For the Rolling Plank, rotate from a side plank into a front plank, then to the opposite side and back through the front. Hold the side positions for approximately 10 seconds and the front position for about 5 seconds, building toward 6 controlled repetitions. Finish with the McGill Curl-Up, maintaining lumbar support with the hands underneath the lower back for 6 repetitions with approximately 10-second contractions.

This is one circuit, not six rounds of abdominal training. The purpose is to create enough trunk stiffness to provide a better platform for force production without exhausting the muscles that are supposed to stabilize you once the real lifting starts. My McGill Warm-Up for an Armour-Plated Core gives the exercise details and progressions, along with a demonstration of the complete circuit.

Think of this stage as putting on your armour before you load the bar.

STAGE 2: MOBILIZE

Once the trunk is switched on, the next step is movement. Dynamic stretching is the default here because the activity you are about to perform is dynamic. Rather than holding a muscle in one position, you move joints progressively through the ranges and velocities that will be required during training.

The operative word is progressively. I use what I call the pendulum approach: start slow and shallow, then go further and faster with each repetition. You are not trying to hit maximum range on rep one; you gradually earn it.

My full-body dynamic circuit includes prisoner squats, split squats, toe touches, waiter’s bows, trunk side bends and rotations, vertical and horizontal arm swings, alternating arm swings, upper-extremity PNF patterns, arm circles, shoulder shrugs, head tilts and rotations, and wrist movements. You do not need dozens of repetitions. Roughly 5 to 10 reps per movement is enough, and I generally work toward 10 progressive repetitions. By the last few reps, the movement should have a noticeably greater range and velocity than it had at the beginning.

That approach has aged well. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis supports dynamic stretching as part of warm-up preparation for lower-body range of motion and performance. My original Warm-Up book puts it another way: do enough to prepare the body, but do not confuse warming up with accumulating work. The more fatigue you manufacture now, the less performance you have available later.

WHAT ABOUT STATIC STRETCHING?

For years, static stretching before lifting was treated almost as a cardinal sin. The research now supports a more intelligent position. Long static stretches performed immediately before maximal strength or explosive activity can impair performance, with the effect becoming more meaningful as stretching duration increases. Shorter exposures, particularly when incorporated into a complete warm-up, appear to have much smaller effects.

So I would not eliminate static stretching from the toolbox. If a specific muscle is genuinely restricting the movement you need, a short targeted stretch may be useful. A tight hip flexor after sitting in the car, for instance, is very different from spending 15 minutes passively stretching every major muscle before a squat workout.

The mistake is not static stretching itself. It is using a generalized flexibility session when what you need is preparation for performance. Correct what needs correcting, then move.

STAGE 3: POTENTIATE

Now the body is stable, the joints have moved progressively through their usable range and temperature is up. The next step is to turn up the nervous system with a small amount of explosive work.

Medicine-ball throws and slams, explosive push-ups and jumps can produce what is commonly called post-activation performance enhancement, or PAPE. In practical terms, a carefully dosed high-intent movement may temporarily improve the performance of an explosive task that follows. The critical phrase is carefully dosed because more is absolutely not better.

My book warned against abusing plyometrics during a warm-up because excessive volume creates exactly what we are trying to avoid: fatigue. I recommended no more than 5 repetitions per set for pre-training plyometrics, and current evidence continues to support the idea that relatively small amounts of conditioning activity can provide an acute performance benefit. A 2023 meta-analysis found a small positive effect from bodyweight conditioning activities before jumping and sprinting, while a 2026 meta-analysis found that adding a PAPE strategy to a general warm-up improved countermovement-jump performance in trained athletes.

We have even seen this with the bench press. In Bench Press Warm-Up: Unlock More Strength With Plyometrics, I look at this concept in more detail. In a randomized study of collegiate athletes, just two plyometric push-ups or two medicine-ball chest passes performed 30 seconds before a 1RM attempt significantly improved subsequent bench-press performance. That is a remarkably small dose and one reason I would modify my initial idea of using 6 to 8 repetitions of each explosive drill. For a warm-up designed to potentiate rather than condition, we simply do not need that much.

THE POWER PRIMER

For most experienced lifters, I would start with one set of 3 to 5 explosive repetitions per movement. If you plan to use all three exercises, stay closer to 3 crisp reps each.

For a general whole-body session, my default sequence would be:

Movement	Dose	Purpose
Vertical Jump	3 reps	High-velocity lower-body power
Explosive Push-Up	3 reps	Upper-body rate of force development
Medicine-Ball Slam	3–5 reps	Total-body explosive intent

Perform every repetition as if it matters: full intent and full speed. Stop the set the moment height, velocity or crispness begins to drop. There is no research showing that this exact three-exercise order is universally superior, so specificity should win. If your first major lift is a squat or deadlift, position the vertical jump closest to that lift. If you are bench pressing, an explosive push-up or medicine-ball chest pass makes sense as the final potentiation drill.

The objective is not to complete a ceremonial sequence. It is to arrive at your first heavy exercise feeling more explosive than you did five minutes earlier.

WHY NOT JUST DO MORE?

Every warm-up method has a dose-response curve. A little raises readiness and, in some cases, a little more may improve it further. Keep going, however, and eventually the warm-up starts stealing from the workout.

That is the problem with many modern “movement prep” routines. Someone collects a dozen excellent exercises from a dozen excellent coaches and performs all of them before every workout. Nothing is inherently wrong with any individual drill, but the collection becomes a 30-minute training session before the training session. The warm-up is not where you prove how much work you can tolerate; it is where you create the conditions to perform the work that matters.

Minimum effective dose wins.

NOW LOAD THE MOVEMENT

The three-stage system prepares the body globally, but there is still one piece missing before the first working set: the specific warm-up. The closer you get to the exercise itself, the more specific preparation should become.

I have described this for years as loading the program into memory. If you are about to squat, squat. If you are about to bench press, bench press. Rehearse the actual range of motion, speed, technique and eventually the load you intend to use.

The common mistake is performing too many repetitions. For strength training, I favour more warm-up sets with fewer reps rather than fewer sets with a pile of reps. This is the principle behind what I call The Taper Warm-Up: as the load rises, the repetitions fall. The heavier the working load, the more steps you generally need on the way there.

A practical starting framework is:

Working range	Specific warm-up
12–20 reps	About 2 progressive sets of 5
6–12 reps	About 3 progressive sets of 5, 4 and 3
1–5 reps	5 or more progressively heavier sets, tapering from roughly 5 reps toward singles

Those are guidelines, not laws. A stronger athlete handling very large absolute loads may need more steps, an experienced lifter may know that fewer are enough, and a previously injured area may deserve additional preparation. What does not change is the principle: increase the load while decreasing the repetitions.

A 2026 review of resistance-training warm-ups supports this general approach. Progressive-intensity warm-ups have improved lifting velocity at heavy loads, resistance-specific warm-ups have increased 1RM performance in some exercises, and progressive loading can improve subsequent repetition performance. Your final warm-up set should therefore make the working weight feel familiar, not make your working muscles tired. That is the difference between preparation and pre-fatigue.

POWER IS NOT JUST FOR YOUNG ATHLETES

The explosive stage may be the easiest part of this system to dismiss with age, yet it may become one of the most important. We tend to talk about aging in terms of muscle mass and strength, but power is force expressed quickly. Getting out of a chair, recovering from a stumble, climbing stairs, moving out of the way of something and maintaining athleticism all require the ability to produce force rapidly, and that ability tends to deteriorate aggressively with age.

A long-standing body of research suggests that muscle power declines earlier and more rapidly than maximal strength and is closely related to physical function in older adults. Power is also trainable. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 20 randomized trials found that power training produced a modest improvement in physical function compared with traditional slower strength training in community-dwelling older adults. The evidence is not strong enough to declare high-velocity training universally superior, but it is strong enough that power should not automatically disappear from a program simply because someone has collected more birthdays.

A 2025 prospective study adds an interesting observation: relative muscle power was a stronger predictor of mortality than relative strength in middle-aged and older adults. That does not prove that increasing power will extend life, but it reinforces how closely the ability to produce force quickly is tied to overall function.

For an older trainee, the solution is not necessarily depth jumps, clap push-ups and aggressive plyometrics. Power training can be scaled with a fast concentric push-up against a bench, an explosive sit-to-stand, a light medicine-ball throw or an intentional “move it fast” concentric phase on an appropriate resistance exercise.

You do not age out of power. You scale the way you train it.

THE ULTIMATE WARM-UP IN PRACTICE

Put everything together and the system is remarkably simple. STABILIZE the trunk so force has a solid platform. MOBILIZE the joints dynamically through the ranges you intend to use. POTENTIATE with a tiny dose of fast, explosive work. Then RAMP the exact movement with progressively heavier, low-repetition warm-up sets.

You do not need 20 minutes on a treadmill, a full yoga class, eight sets of jumps, a conditioning circuit or every corrective exercise you have ever seen on Instagram. You need enough preparation to improve the workout. No more.

TRAINING ECONOMY: CHECK MORE BOXES WITHOUT ADDING ANOTHER WORKOUT

There is another reason I like this system: training economy. Before the first working set has even begun, you have already addressed trunk stability, mobility and high-velocity force production. The strength workout itself can then develop maximal strength, hypertrophy and muscular endurance depending on how it is programmed. Full-range resistance training can contribute to usable mobility, while intentional acceleration develops the ability to apply force quickly.

In other words, you do not need a separate hour for every physical quality. You need intelligent overlap, particularly if you are a busy adult or an older trainee trying to maintain a broad range of physical capabilities. The objective is not to cram as much work as possible into one session. It is to get the greatest useful return from the least unnecessary work.

That is training economy.

DO YOU NEED EVERY STAGE EVERY TIME?

No. This is a system, not a religion. If you already walk to the gym on a hot summer day, your general temperature preparation will look different from someone training at 6:00 a.m. in January. If your back feels excellent, you may move efficiently through the stability circuit. If one area feels restricted, spend a little more time mobilizing it. If you are doing a light recovery session, there may be little need for a full potentiation sequence.

Likewise, beginners should not throw advanced plyometrics into a warm-up simply because explosive work appears on a chart. The components should fit the trainee and the workout.

My Warm-Up book contains dozens of possible techniques, from soft-tissue work and movement preparation to activation drills, balance work, plyometrics and advanced neural strategies. I explore several of those approaches in 3 Warm-Up Methods for More Strength. The point was never to perform all of them. It was to create a toolbox so that you could use the right tool when you need it.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Most people think of a warm-up as the stuff they need to get through before the workout starts. I look at it differently: the warm-up is the first opportunity to improve the workout. Done poorly, it wastes time and can leave you weaker or more fatigued. Done properly, it improves movement quality, prepares the nervous system, rehearses technique and creates a better platform for strength and power.

The system does not need to be complicated:

STABILIZE → MOBILIZE → POTENTIATE → RAMP → TRAIN

Build stability without exhausting the core, move dynamically without turning flexibility work into a second session, use explosive movements with maximal intent and minimal volume, and then rehearse the lift with progressively heavier weights and progressively fewer repetitions.

By the time your first working set arrives, you should not feel tired. You should feel ready.

That is the ultimate warm-up.

TAKE THE NEXT STEP

If you want the full theory, exercise variations and specific warm-up strategies behind this approach, The Warm-Up: Modern Methods for Strength Training expands the system far beyond what can fit into a single article. It covers dynamic stretching, soft-tissue work, activation, neural preparation, specific warm-up schemes, plyometrics and advanced methods designed to improve performance without wasting energy.

If you learn better by watching the techniques in action, Warm-Up to Strength Training is the companion video presentation. It demonstrates many of the methods discussed here and is designed for lifters, coaches and personal trainers who want to see how these strategies are actually performed.

Prepare better. Train harder. Get more from the work that counts.