Are you wasting time foam rolling & stretching before lifting weights?
Two things to know going into this:
- You gotta do the damn warm-up before the workout. We’re talking weight training here, obviously. Nobody cares about Pilates or some equally boring activity. Anywho. Coming into the gym and going straight into your working set is something out of the Middle Ages. It’s silly. You need to increase your core body temperature, improve your range of motion, and decrease muscle stiffness first.
- Warm-up of most people consists of 5–10 minutes of low-moderate intensity cardio and 5–10 minutes of foam rolling/dynamic or static stretching. Foam rolling, by the way, is the goofiest-looking shit ever — spikes, different colors, shapes, sizes, and densities. Can you explain this?
And I’d argue that you don’t need any of that in your warm-up. You definitely don’t need static stretching where you stretch your muscle for about 30 seconds as it has negative effects on subsequent strength performances.
And, as a recent systematic review with meta-analysis found, you don’t need foam rolling too because it pretty much does absolutely fuck all.
