How to warm up when session starts with upper body

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Good afternoon -

I am currently on the time crunch 2.0 template. Week 1 Day 2 starts with the bench press for a single @8, followed by some back-off sets of 5 @9.

My question:
What do you guys do to warm up when your first lift of the day is an upper body movement?

Back-story:
My warm up for the day was to squat 5x5 with the empty bar, like always, then I bench pressed 10x2 with the empty bar (pretty standard for me), then started working up to my work sets for bench. I did 95x10, 135x5, 185x5, 225x3, 265x1 and finally 275x1@8-8.5…then did my backoff sets…After that I over-shot my weight on pendlay row myoreps…which was awful…could barely do 12 reps on the activation set @8 and I think my back was out of extension the whole time…first time doing myoreps on this program so I am feeling it out still.

The “problem”:
I ended up with reallyyy sore shoulders after this session. DOMS hit me a lot worse than it has before…shoulders were hurting just tossing the football a short distance with my brother-in-law two days later.
Bench press has never left me this sore.
The only differences seemed to be that 1. I have never done bench press first in a session until now 2. I don’t think I have trained my bench at this high of intensity (5 reps @9 for multiple sets) 3. I also think my pendlay rows being too heavy could be contributing to the shoulder DOMS…it was very taxing trying to keep the bar against my legs.

2

I usually bench a few sets of 5 with the empty barbell (3-6 sets) then start warming up. Here is exactly what I did 2 Thursdays ago:

Bar x 5 x 5
95 x 5
135 x 5
185 x 5
225 x 5
275 x 5
315 x 1
365 x 1
415 x 1
335 x 8
315 x 8 x 3

1 Like
3

Thank you for the response! So it seems like I just need some more warmup volume before I get after it. I also expect to adapt to doing bench first on day 2 as the program continues.

Many thanks for the outstanding templates and content you guys put out. Barbell Medicine is like an oasis in a desert of dogmatic thinking and Tom-foolery. No offense to anyone named Tom. Would love to see a Barbell Medicine interview on Joe Rogan someday! It would be a good fit I think.