I’m a big fan of warm-up sets, they are a great way to “prime” your body ready to lift weights. But, how many you do will depend on:

1.  The complexity of the exercise you are doing 
2.  How experienced and strong you are 
3.  The number of repetitions of the exercise you are performing 
4.  At what stage in a workout the exercise is

Let’s go through each 

1. Big compound lifts like squats, split squats, deadlifts etc are more multi-joint and complex. These exercises are more likely to require warm-up sets, these big lifts might need 1-4 warm-up sets. Whereas a bicep curl or leg extension are low-skill and doesn’t really need any.
2. If you have been lifting for a little while and you can lift quite heavily you will need to do more warm-up sets. If you intend to lift 100kg in a deadlift then you might need to do 2-4 warm-up sets at a lighter load. Whereas if you intend to deadlift 50kg you probably might only need to do 1-2 warm-up sets.
3. If you are doing higher reps such as 12-15 reps you won’t need as many warm-up sets. You can probably do 1-2 warm-ups, mainly because the weight lifted for 12 reps is significantly lighter than 6 reps. 
4.  If it’s the first or second exercise in your plan you need to do warm-up sets. But after you have done your first two exercises you should be well primed and there might not be any need to do more warm-up sets. 

Does it count as volume?

No, the sets shouldn’t be anywhere near hard enough to create any sort of fatigue. So if you want to do 8 sets of glutes in a session you only need to count the top sets. A smart thing to do is to ½ the number of reps you do for each of your warm-up sets. So if you intend to do 8 reps in training, do 4 reps per warm-up set as you ramp the weight up. 

This topic is about getting into the weights room and seeing what feels right for you. Do you prefer more or less, do you like slow controlled warm-up sets to “feel” the target muscle or explosive warm-up sets to prime / potentiate the nervous system or do you prefer a mixture of both speeds – that’s what I do!

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