The first set is the empty bar. Twelve reps, maybe fifteen, the rhythm loose and automatic. Then the weight climbs — fifty or sixty percent of what’s coming — and the reps drop to eight. Then seventy for five. Eighty for three. By the time the working weight is loaded, the ramp has rungs, and each rung was placed there by a protocol you stopped questioning years ago.
How many steps that ramp has — two, three, four — is what the whole warm-up is built around. Until recently, nobody had tested whether the number of steps actually changed anything at the bar.
How Many Warm-Up Sets Should You Do Before Your Working Set?
The number of warm-up sets has negligible effect on performance at moderate training loads — one set, two sets, and zero sets produced the same outcomes in trained lifters. What determines the warm-up’s benefit is the load of the last set. Warming up close to the working weight primes the nervous system for greater force output through post-activation performance enhancement.
— Enes, Schoenfeld et al. 2025 · SportRxiv; Viveiros et al. 2024 · J Bodywork & Movement Therapies
When the count was tested in lifters with years of training experience, one warm-up set, two warm-up sets, and no warm-up sets gave the same result. Strength, power, bar speed — the differences were negligible. A 2025 investigation from the Schoenfeld lab — the most-cited name in resistance-training research — confirmed it: more warm-up sets do not produce better performance at moderate training loads.
Everything about the warm-up protocol was real — the ascending weights, the precise plate math, the discipline of building from the empty bar — except the assumption that the number of steps was the variable doing the work.
A separate lab, working independently on another continent, found what the count was hiding: the load of the last warm-up set. When warm-up load was tested at 40%, 60%, and 80% of the working weight, the heaviest warm-up produced more total work in the training session that followed. The mechanism is called post-activation performance enhancement — a heavier contraction primes the nervous system, increasing force on the sets that come next. The warm-up that moved performance was the one that loaded close to the working weight — not the ramp with the most carefully counted rungs.
the proximity of the last warm-up to the working weight, not the number of sets in the ramp, is what drives the benefit.
The evidence arrived from two separate research programs — one in Brazil, one in New York — asking different questions about warm-up protocols, and both identified the same variable: the proximity of the last warm-up to the working weight, not the number of sets in the ramp, is what drives the benefit.
Both studies tested moderate training loads — the range most lifters use for muscle growth, not maximal singles or competition attempts. For everyday training, the signal is unambiguous — for a true one-rep-max attempt, that experiment hasn’t happened yet.
With the count question settled and the load variable identified, the piece of the warm-up still worth questioning is how much total time the body needs before that heavy set — and whether the same principle — load over count — shapes the working sets themselves.