Why the twenty minute routine fails

A warm-up only works if it happens. The elaborate sequences you find online are not wrong, they are just too expensive in time and attention to survive contact with a real week. Members do them enthusiastically for nine days and then never again.

So the useful question is not what the ideal warm-up looks like. It is what the shortest warm-up that still does the job looks like.

What it has to do

Three things. Raise your core temperature so tissue tolerates load better. Move the joints you are about to load through the range you are about to use. Switch on the muscles that tend to stay asleep, which for most people means glutes and mid-back.

Warming up is preparation for the session, not a session of its own.

The four minutes

Ninety seconds on a bike or rower, hard enough that talking gets slightly awkward. Then ten controlled cat-cows, ten world greatest stretches split between sides, fifteen banded pull-aparts and twenty bodyweight hip hinges. That is it.

Then do your first working movement with an empty bar for two sets. Those ramp-up sets are part of the warm-up and they are the part people skip most often.

When to do more

If you are over forty, training first thing in the morning, or coming back from an injury, buy yourself an extra three or four minutes on the specific joint in question. Everyone else is better served by spending that time on the actual session.