The Warm-Up Is the First Ten Minutes of Training

Every class at CrossFit IRONSKY, the 06:30 included, starts the same way. Not with the workout. With roughly ten minutes of taking your joints through the positions the workout is about to demand. Most people call that the bit before training. We call it the first part of training, and we coach it the same way we coach the rest.

This post is about why, and about what a good warm-up looks like.

A mobility flow is a sequence, not a stretch

The warm-up we run most often is a mobility flow: a chain of movements that carries the ankles, hips, spine and shoulders through their full range, each position leading into the next, with no stop in between. Picture a deep squat that opens into a lunge, the back arm reaching up and turning the upper back, then a stand into a pass-through with a PVC pipe. Three joints, one movement, no pause.

The aim is control, not flexibility. Nobody wins a flow by getting lower than the person beside them. It is a rehearsal. You find the bottom of your squat before a barbell is on your back. You find your overhead position before the weight arrives there. If a hip or a shoulder is tight today, you learn that now, slowly and without load, and your coach learns it with you.

Does static stretching before training hurt your lifts?

You may have read that holding a stretch before you train costs you power. The honest answer is less dramatic, and it changes what you should do. A 2019 review in Frontiers in Physiology found that short static stretches, held for 60 seconds or less per muscle group and placed inside a full warm-up, had a negligible effect on strength and power, in the region of one to two percent, and increased range of motion. Holds longer than a minute were a different matter and were linked to real drops in performance.

So the rule we coach is simple. Long holds belong after the session or on a rest day. In the warm-up, if a position needs a stretch, keep it short and move straight out of it into the flow. The flow does the rest of the work.

The warm-up has to match the workout

A generic warm-up is identical every day: a jog, some arm circles, a handful of air squats. It gets you sweaty and tells you nothing about how you are moving. A warm-up that works is built backwards from the session that follows it.

Deadlifts on the board? The flow spends longer at the hips and hamstrings, and we practise setting the back before anything leaves the floor. Overhead squats or handstand work? More time at the wrists, shoulders and upper back, and the first empty-bar reps count as warm-up rather than as the start of the lift. A long conditioning piece? The heart rate comes up gradually and every movement in the workout gets a slow run-through before the clock starts.

This is why every class at CrossFit IRONSKY opens with a coached warm-up written for that day, and why the coach is on the floor for all of it. It is not something that happens while people are still arriving. It is where we watch how everyone moves and decide who needs what before the workout begins.

How long should a warm-up take?

Eight to twelve minutes covers most sessions. Under five and you have not reached your end ranges. Past fifteen and you are spending energy you wanted for the workout. That is coaching experience, not a textbook figure, and we adjust it: a heavy squat day gets longer at the hips, and a cold winter morning at Ayiou Lazarou 83 gets longer full stop.

If you want to run a flow at home, a short daily version holds up better than a long one once a week. Members who sit at a desk all day and only open their hips three times a week in class tell us they feel the difference by midweek. Five slow minutes before breakfast closes most of that gap.

The mistakes we correct most often

• Rushing. The flow runs at the pace of your breathing, not the pace of the clock. If you finished in three minutes, you skipped the ranges that needed the time.
• Working only what already moves. Hips that open easily get another thirty seconds while stiff ankles get nothing. The tight joint is the one that shows up under the bar. A coach standing next to you spots this in one rep. You rarely spot it in yourself.
• Borrowing someone else's warm-up. A person who stands all day and a person who sits for nine hours do not need the same flow. The desk worker needs more at the hips and the upper back, almost every time.
• Treating it as optional. Arriving late and jumping straight into the workout skips the only part of the hour built around your joints rather than the clock.

None of these are hard to fix. All of them are hard to see on your own, which is the whole case for doing your warm-up in a room with a coach in it.

The warm-up is not the thing you get through before training. It is the first ten minutes of training, and it decides how the other fifty go. Give it the attention you give the workout and the workout gets better.

Stay strong, stay wild, stay IRONSKY.