One of the things I cringe at most when I see people training in the gym is when they start a new exercise by immediately going to a heavy weight on the very first set. For example the guy who lies down on the bench press and proceeds to load up the bar with 80% of his maximum capacity, without any warm-up reps. This is a sure-fire way to get injured. The reason being when your muscles are still cold at the beginning of your workout, they won’t be able to go through the full range of motion or activate fast enough to handle heavy weight safely. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done that weight in a previous workout; if you go from 0 to 100 on any weights exercise without a warm-up, it will lead to sub-par performance at best and a recipe for disaster at worst.

I strongly recommend you begin every compound exercise with at least 1-2 warm up sets of light weight, gradually working up in weight to your actual sets. These sets don’t count as your work sets, ie. if your current program says Barbell Squats – 10 reps x 3 sets, you would do the 2 warm up sets before the 3 work sets. So for example if your goal for the day is to hit 100kg on Barbell Squats for 3 sets of 10 reps, you should start with a warm up set of just the bar x 12, then another warm up set of 60kg x 8, then a final warm up set of 80kg x 5 before going into your 3 sets of 10 at 100kg. Never go straight from the bar to a very heavy weight unless you want your joints to visit Snap City!