Q&A: Do I need warm up sets, & should I train to failure?

Hey guys, what's up? Tyrone here as always, and today's Q&A is from Matt. So Matt's questions are both related to exercise, and I know for a lot of you guys in the group, exercise is one of the areas, or training is one of the areas where you'd like to kind of brush up your knowledge and learn a bit more about it. So this week, Matt's two questions are, the first is, if I'm already generally warmed up, Do I need to warm up in my sets— sorry, do I need to warm up in my sets too, or could I go straight into the working weights? Good question. So even if you've done a warm-up, I would always recommend you do at least a couple of warm-up sets first. So let's say, for example, you're doing bench press. So you do your general dynamic warm-up, hopefully to get sort of blood pumping and get the body generally moving well and joints lubricated, etc. Then I would recommend you do a couple of sort of working sets, or warm-up sets, sorry, before you move into your working sets. That will just sort of prime the muscles for the load that they're about to have to handle as you start ramping up the weights and so on. Is it essential to, to do that? Not necessarily if you're more experienced, but I would definitely recommend that, that you do so just to reduce your risk of injury. So yeah, where possible, do a couple of warm-up sets first and then break into your working sets and start shifting the heavier weights that are going to create the stimulus for change that your body needs. Question 2: When training for strength, would I be best to rep to failure or leave 1 or 2 in the tank on each set? Now, when it comes to training for strength, the— what's the word I'm looking for? So the Strength training has more of a neurological impact on the body than it does a muscular impact. So, if we're doing bodybuilding, that's generally speaking, sort of the 8 to 12 rep range. And what we're trying to do there is stimulate the muscle. We're trying to work the muscle to a point of fatigue in order to encourage growth. When it comes to strength training, there is less regard for stimulation of the muscle directly, and instead we're trying to trigger the nervous system to have to respond. So that what happens in the end is the body actually recruits more available muscle fiber in the movement. So we, when we're trying to build strength alone, we can actually get stronger without needing to build bigger muscle. We just learn how to recruit more of the available muscle that we have. So, do we need to rep to failure or leave 1 or 2 in the tank? Now, generally speaking, I would recommend we leave 1 or 2 in the tank. So, you can rep to form failure. So, what I mean by that is you go to the point and you stop just before you know your form would break down. So, you're still giving the body a fairly large stimulus and a need or requirement to adapt and to change because you've gone pretty heavy, but you've not gone to the point where form breaks down and therefore, again, we increase that risk of injury. Now, can we do that? Yes, we can. We can go beyond that point and break form. There's a saying we have, which is we need to break form in order to make form, but that is more applicable to more advanced lifters. So, if you've been lifting for a long time, then you're more likely to have, I guess, more adapted, better quality tissues that can handle greater loads even without perfect form. So, if you're a relative newbie, I'd say less than 2 years experience, then I wouldn't recommend necessarily going to failure with heavy weights. So we're talking like 5 reps and below, those kinds of weights. So if it's a weight that you cannot lift 5 times, um, or more, so if it's 5 and below, then I don't recommend necessarily going to complete failure where your body's bent all out of shape and all the rest of it, um, just because again that risk of injury, the, the, the greater we go into poor form, the more chance there is we're going to hurt ourselves. And then obviously we need time off training As we do that, we lose conditioning, we lose strength, we lose our fat loss progress if we've been chasing that, and so on. So, there's just no point. The relative return on investment is not worth the risk that comes with it. So, yeah, no need to rep to failure. Definitely not. Leaving 1 or 2 in the tank, I would say, if you have an idea of your 1 rep maxes, you know, like your maximal lifts, then you want to push yourself to say 90 to 95% of that fairly regular, but you don't necessarily need to max out and go to failure every, every time, because what that will do quite often is stop adapting and stop getting the results that we want. So hopefully that answers the two questions. The first one was, if I'm already generally warmed up, do I need to warm up in my sets? Could I just go straight into my working weights? And then the final question was, training for strength, would I be best to rep to failure or leave 1 or 2 in the tank? So obviously, if you're unsure, if you've only just jumped on, my answers have just been posted. So I recommend you rewind the video. And obviously, for the rest of you guys, if you have any questions, if there's anything in particular you want to know, doesn't have to be training related, could be food, could be sleep, could be detox, could be nature, sunlight, could be mindset, Whatever it is, if it's related to health, ask me and I will have an answer. And if I don't have an answer, I'm pretty sure I'll know someone who does, and I will get the answer from them and then come back and help you guys as best I can. Take it easy, people, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Be cool.