Okay, I want you to visualize a situation with me. You’ll need to see and feel the things I’m going to describe.

You’re in the gym and you’re getting ready to start a workout. You’ve just finished putting your shoes on and it’s time to start warming up. Now, this is during a time period when you’ve been training really hard. You’ve been hitting a lot of maximum attempts in the snatch and clean and jerk, along with pushing your squats and pulls about as heavy as you’ve ever gone. Training has been good, but you’ve paid the price. What I mean by that is…you’re living with some pain right now. And so you’re sitting on the bench with your shoes on, getting ready for your workout, and you sit there for just a couple of seconds and realize something in your head, “Okay, this is gonna hurt.”

You’re not injured right now, mind you. You don’t have any tears or pulls that are going to force you to change your workouts. You’re just hurting, that’s all. You’ve got what we call “training pain” and you’re thinking about how your wrists, knees, back, shoulders and elbows are going to feel when you put your hands on the bar and perform your first snatches of the day. It’s not pleasant. But you’re not a wimp, so you step up to the platform and get started anyway. The people in your gym can see the little scrunching-up facial gestures you make when you put that bar over your head the first few times and then sit down in the bottom position. They get it, because they’re hurting too.

We’ve talked about pain before. But what I want to do in this article is look at two specific things. 1) I want to look at some effective ways to prepare your body before you even touch the barbell. These are things that can drastically reduce how bad your joints feel when you start your lifts, so you should keep reading if you want things to hurt less. 2) We need to check out a few things you can do at the end of your workouts, when you’re done with the barbell, that will also reduce your pain level from day to day.

When you were young, you could just walk in the gym, loosen up for two minutes, hit the barbell as hard as possible with some max attempts, and then walk out and go home. Your body was producing hormones so fast that your recovery time was almost instantaneous. You didn’t live with huge levels of pain. Some soreness…sure. But not the kind of stuff we were just talking about. Well, most of you who are reading this aren’t young anymore. So if you want to keep training and making progress, you damn well better be interested in finding some warm-up and restorative methods that will make your training experience easier and more effective.

I’m trying to help you hurt less, brothers and sisters. Unless you’re a masochist, you should WANT to hurt less. Fortunately for you, I’ve been training for many years and I’m getting older now, and I’ve managed to find a few surefire tactics that keep me from living in a world of agony. Now, I’m passing them on to you.

Warm-Up, Chinese-Style…

Anybody with some serious training experience has felt the sting of starting your first few sets before your body is primed and ready to lift. Your joints are tight, you can’t get yourself into the right positions, and you’re getting some pretty big pain from some pretty small weights. It sucks, big time. We often wind up devoting a ton of time to warm-up/stretching preparation. I’ve heard a few older lifters make the joke, “It takes an hour to warm up and thirty minutes to lift.” What I’m going to do here is simple. I’m just going to give you my exact warm-up routine (what I do before I put weights on the bar and start lifting). This is what I’ve been doing to get ready for my workouts for the last five or six years, and I can’t say enough about how happy I’ve been with it. I’ve tried a lot of different warm-up methods in the past, and there is no doubt that this one is the best progression I’ve ever used.

I’ve learned some of this from different lifters and coaches over the years, but most of it comes from the videos I’ve seen from the Chinese weightlifting program. They’ve got extensive warm-up progressions they go through, together as a team, before they start their workouts. These videos are on YouTube, and I’ve also trained with some people who have been to China and verified how their lifters do it. I hate to glorify the Chinese so much because I’m a patriotic American, but dammit…they’ve got things figured out, don’t they? Their success is a result of their efficient methods (along with a lot of other things), so my ears are always open when I hear somebody say, “In China, the lifters and coaches…” So, this is what I do before I lift:

• 10-15 standing hops. This is as simple as it sounds; I just stand there and hop up in the air ten or fifteen times, not trying for maximum height and not pausing between hops. Just up and down like a pogo stick, getting maybe four or five inches off the ground; great way to get the ankles and knees ready for a little ballistic impact.
• 10-15 jumping jacks. Now I’m activating the groin and the muscles of the upper body, still getting good ballistic movement.
• 10-15 standing hops. Back to the hops again.
• 10-15 high knee/butt kicks. These are just basic track and field warm-up exercises, high knee jogging in place, alternating with butt kickers, now we’re starting to get the hamstrings, quads, and glutes loose.
o All of these first four exercises are done consecutively with no pause between, one just runs right into the next one.
• 15 horizontal arm swings. Now I’m just standing still, swinging the arms back and forth across my chest, trying to keep them long and get them as far behind me as possible on the backswing.
• 15 arm circles. Windmill-type circles, one arm at a time, 15 circles with each arm, keeping the arms long and making the biggest circles possible.
• 15 elbow circles. People laugh when they see these because I’m just standing there making big circles with my forearm, keeping the upper arm stationary. Do these with just a little bit of quickness; get your blood moving.
• 15-second wrist stretches against a wall. Just pressing the hands flat against a wall and locking the elbows, letting the joints get used to bending.
• PVC pipe snatch-grip overhead rotations. Grab a PVC pipe or stretching stick in your snatch grip and rotate it with the arms straight- forward, over and behind. This one looks like you’re missing a snatch behind you, only you’re not taking your hands off the stick. It might be tough if you’ve got really tight shoulders, so you can move the hands out wider if you’ve got that problem.
• 20 side-to-side torso twists- Just simple twists, trying to get the shoulders as far as possible to the right and left on each rotation.
• 15 side bends. Nothing complicated here, just bending sideways at the hips to the left and right, knees stay straight.
• 20 wide-stance groin shifts. This is a name I made for this stretch. Just put your feet out wide to the sides, keep your knees straight, and shift your hips to the right and left, feeling the stretch in the opposite groin (when you shift to the right, the left groin is getting stretched). This is a movement stretch; you’re going back and forth slowly.
• 10 knee kicks. Just stand there and kick your knee back and forth ten times, then do the other leg. Get full flexion and extension on each kick, and hang on to something to steady yourself if you start to lose your balance.
• 10 leg swings. Stand in front of a bar in a squat rack, grab the bar with your hands, and swing your leg back and forth like you’re kicking an NFL field goal. Get the longest possible range here; your foot should come up to the level of the bar on the forward part of the swing.
• 15 second lunge groin stretches. One of the only static stretches I do before a workout, just getting into a lunge position and pushing the hips forward to stretch the groin. Don’t over-stretch and tear something.
• 10 toe-touches with a PVC pipe or stretching stick. Simple; grab the stick in a clean grip and do ten toe-touches up and down, keeping the knees straight but not locked.
• 10 behind-the-neck presses with PVC pipe or stretching stick. Exactly like it sounds, just pressing up and down to full lockout.
• 10 back squats with a PVC pipe or stretching stick. Again, just like it sounds. Get that bottom position ready.
• 5 toe-touches with an empty barbell. Basically like a straight-leg deadlift.
• 5 behind-the-neck presses with an empty barbell. Simple.
• 5 back squats with an empty barbell. Now we’re getting the bottom position looser with a little more weight than the PVC pipe.

That takes me about eight minutes, usually. I hustle through it, not stopping to chat with anybody or fiddle with my phone. After the last thing on the list, I load the bar with 50 kilos for my first set of snatches. As I said, that’s the whole shebang. I’ve been using it for several years and I’ve probably had less pain and fewer little pulls and strains than even before.

Now, there are a couple of asterisks here. If I’m having particular tightness in a certain area, I’ll add a little something to this order. A perfect example would be foam rolling on the IT bands. When this area starts to get tight, I use a foam roller on it for 5-6 reps before I get started. This type of thing would be in addition to the normal progression I listed here. I never leave anything out. I’ve seen a lot of lifters who have to use bands, tennis balls, and other little gadgets to loosen up tight shoulders, calves, or whatever. If you’ve got a problem area like this, you might just need to try out a few different techniques until you settle on a routine you like.

As you can probably see from looking at this, I think most of your warm-up routine should be movement-based. I don’t like doing a lot of static stretching before lifting workouts. I say that because I used to do a LOT of static stretching before I trained, and it led to several minor injuries. We’ve read some research in recent years about how pronounced static stretching of a muscle prior to lifting can increase the chance of a strain or partial tear, but I didn’t know this when I was a young athlete. I just stretched the same way I was taught in football practice, lots of stretch-and-hold-for-ten-seconds stuff. That was the only thing I had ever known. Now, having learned so much over the years, I believe joint mobility is what you’re aiming for when you’re preparing to train and light ballistic movement is the best way to get it.

Post-Workout Ideas…

This section can be short and sweet. When you’re finished with the barbell for the day, DO NOT just take off your shoes and go home. If you’re serious about doing this sport, you need to add some stretching to the end of your workout. If you say, “Yeah yeah, whatever. I’m too lazy to stretch after my workout. It’s boring.” Fair enough, no problem. Have fun living in pain and getting injured all the time.

Listen, you can do yourself a world of good with just ten minutes of stretching before you leave the gym. That’s all we’re talking about here, ten lousy minutes! And this is the time when static stretching is a good idea. In fact, it’s exactly what you should be doing. Work on the stretch-and-hold-for-ten-seconds stuff we mentioned earlier, and focus on the hamstrings, lower back, groin, and quads. I personally don’t do much upper body stretching at the end of my workouts. But if you have a lot of trouble with tightness in your shoulders, you should probably add some for yourself.

Just do it, seriously…

Everything I’ve suggested in this article will add about twenty minutes to your workouts…total. Ten minutes for the warm-up routine before you get started, and ten more minutes of static stretching after you’re finished. I will absolutely bloody promise you that this will work, people. I do this every single time I train, exactly the way I’ve written it out here. I can verify from personal experience that you’ll have less pain if you do these things.

You’ll probably have fewer minor injuries too. The tightness that accumulates in your joints can build up to a point where you might actually change your technique in the snatch and clean and jerk without even realizing that you’re doing it. This happens sometimes. Lifters are so stiff that they’ll do anything to avoid the positions that lead to flaming, excruciating discomfort. Unintentionally, the athletes might make little tweaks to their technique because they’re trying to stay away from those positions. Before you know it, you might have actually developed some technical problems in your lifts…all because you were in pain and you weren’t doing the proper things to manage it. Then you’ve got a problem, jack.

I could suggest dozens of other strategies that will reduce your pain. Do grip strengthening exercises because they’ll keep your elbows healthier. If you’ve got lower back pain, it’s probably caused by tight hamstrings and lack of hydration. Six sets of rotator cuff exercises with ten-pound dumbbells every day will probably keep you from getting shoulder injuries. The right amount of protein and water intake will change your whole pain level. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera… I know about these things because I’ve neglected each and every one of them over the years, and I paid the price. After so many years of pain and injuries, I finally broke down and started getting serious about handling them. And look at me now, forty years old and still lifting successfully without constantly walking around in the pit of hell. This could be you, people. You should feel free to steal anything on here and add it to your repertoire if it’ll make you better. You’re all looking for a sharper way to do things; that’s why you subscribe to this magazine. So help yourself to any suggestion on here. Treat it like a salad bar. Just take whatever looks good. As Ron Burgundy said, “If you like it, you can take it. If you don’t, just send it right back.”