I spent years training in commercial gyms before I opened HVPT, and the thing that used to drive me mad was watching people walk through the door, load up a barbell, and start pulling heavy deadlifts within two minutes of arriving. Cold muscles, cold joints, nervous system still in "sitting at a desk" mode. It is a recipe for pulling something, and I have seen it happen more times than I can count.
Every single HVPT session starts with a proper warm-up. That is not optional. It is not filler to waste your time before the "real" training begins. It is the foundation of a session that actually works.
What a warm-up actually does
Your warm-up has three jobs. First, it increases blood flow to the muscles you are about to use. Cold muscles do not contract as efficiently and they are more prone to strains. Getting blood moving means the tissue is warmer, more elastic, and ready to produce force.
Second, it primes your nervous system. When you have been sitting down all day, your body is not ready to lift heavy things. A good warm-up wakes up the neural pathways between your brain and your muscles so that when you get under a barbell, your body actually fires properly. This is why people often feel stronger after a thorough warm-up. They are not actually stronger. Their nervous system is just switched on.
Third, and this is the one people care about most, it reduces your injury risk. The research on this is clear. A structured warm-up before training significantly lowers your chances of muscle strains, joint injuries, and the kind of niggles that build up over time and eventually force you to stop training altogether.
What I see people getting wrong
The most common mistake is skipping it entirely. The second most common mistake is doing five minutes on a bike at the lowest resistance while scrolling through your phone. That is not a warm-up. That is sitting down in a slightly different position.
Another one I see is people stretching cold muscles statically before they train. Holding a hamstring stretch for 30 seconds when you have just walked in from the cold is not helpful. Static stretching has its place, but it is after training, not before.
What an HVPT warm-up looks like
Our warm-ups typically run for about eight to ten minutes and they are structured around what we are about to do in the session. If it is a lower-body day, you will see things like bodyweight squats, hip circles, glute bridges, and some dynamic stretches for the hip flexors and ankles. If it is upper-body focused, we will do band pull-aparts, shoulder circles, press-up variations, and thoracic spine rotations.
We usually finish the warm-up with some kind of activation work — something that gets the target muscles firing at a low intensity before we load them up. That might be a set of light kettlebell swings before deadlifts, or some banded squats before we get under a barbell.
The whole thing is progressive. We start easy and build intensity so that by the time you pick up a heavy weight, your body has already rehearsed the movement pattern and everything is firing as it should.
The cost of skipping it
If you skip your warm-up, two things happen. In the short term, your performance in that session is worse. You will feel stiffer, your first few working sets will feel heavier than they should, and you will not move as well. In the long term, you are accumulating stress on joints and connective tissue that has not been prepared for it. That is how people end up with chronic shoulder issues, lower back pain, and knee problems that sideline them for months.
I have seen members lose weeks of training because of injuries that a proper warm-up would have prevented. It is not worth saving eight minutes.
So next time you are tempted to skip it and go straight to the heavy stuff, remember this: the warm-up is not wasting your time. It is making everything that comes after it better.