Movement Prep for Lifting and Rowing

Do you currently weightlift? If I were to ask you what your movement prep is, would you be able to tell me? In this post, I’m going to go over what movement prep is regarding weightlifting, why it’s important, and go over examples for some of the main lifts to help you get those ideas churning in your mind. Maybe you already do movement prep, but you didn’t realize that’s what it was.

What’s it for?

Movement prep is important beyond simply warming up for your workout. It’s important to prime your muscles. That’s a big thing, and it’s number one! Prime your muscles for the lift that you’re going to be doing.

You’re going to want to prepare differently before squatting than you would before overhead pressing. You’re going to want to prepare differently for benching than you would for deadlifts. With the main lifts, depending on the one that you’re doing that day, movement prep will help you for that main lift.

Movement prep also helps to loosen up anything. With squats you’ll want to loosen up your ankles and hips. For deadlifts it would be your hamstrings. Movements that help to loosen up the body are active stretches.

Movement prep can be useful for warming up your core for those big compound movements. Our core is essential to do these lifts and it’s important to make sure that your core is warmed up before doing them.

These exercises don’t need to take a long time. Five minutes is all you need to move through a couple of exercises to feel much better and ready for your lift.

I know I talk a lot about rowing too, and you can do movement prep before you row to help you loosen up. Maybe you’re a little bit sore, and you’d like help working some things out before you hop on the machine.

How to do it

With movement prep, coaches of all different breeds are going to do it differently. Some are going to incorporate it straight into their warmup and they might not even call it movement prep. Personally, I like to have my clients do five minutes of some light cardio, then go into their movement prep.

Sometimes the core is mixed in with the movement prep. This way, my clients know that these are the exercises that are getting you ready to lift. Pay attention to these exercises and move through them with purpose.

Examples

Here are examples of movement prep options to go along with a main lift.  

For squats you want to loosen up your ankles. I like to use an ankle opener where you use a weight to stretch that calf muscle. If you need to do some joint mobilization, that can be helpful too. I like to warm up the back muscles because even though squatting is a leg movement, when you’re bracing you still want to incorporate and brace with everything that you have. This includes your back! For this, I like to incorporate exercises like supermans or planks.

For things like deadlifts, I like to make sure that your back and hamstrings are nice and warmed up. Again, core movements like the plank can be good here or some carries like suitcase, farmer, anything of that sort. Then, I like to use prone w pulls, something to strengthen the shoulder blade muscles before you lock those in place for your deadlift.

And of course, I have to mention rowing. Rowing is very similar to a deadlift, so you want to loosen up the back and the hamstrings just like you would with deadlifts. It can be those movements I mentioned earlier, toe touches, leg swings, etc. also work well. Also, anything where you’re lying on the ground and loosening up your back, like putting your knees from one side to the other, can help your back get ready to row.

These are just a couple of examples of movement prep. There are different exercises that you’ll want to do when you’re overhead pressing or pulling things to get those small muscles warmed up and ready to go.

If you want to see more examples of movement prep that you can do for your lifting and rowing, I have a sign up for my free movement prep guide below. It’ll give you three options for every main lift. You don’t have to do all three, especially if you’ve got multiple main lifts going on in the day.

This guide will give you ideas of exercises so that you can incorporate movement prep into your workouts.