Warm-up Sets Calculator

A warm-up is not just “something light first”. Each rung does a different job: the empty bar grooves the movement and gets the joint moving, roughly 50 % feeds the pattern back under load, 70 % scales the force your muscles are producing, and 85 % primes the nervous system so the first working rep does not feel like a shock. Rest grows as the weight does — around 45 seconds early on, up to two or three minutes before the heaviest rungs, because those exist to potentiate you rather than to tire you out.

Compound lifts get the full ramp; isolation work gets two sets. A squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press or row loads a lot of joints at once and earns the longer approach. A curl or a lateral raise does not — two sets at about 50 % and 75 % is enough, and more just costs you the reps that matter. That is the only thing the Lift menu changes.

Weights are rounded to plates you can actually load. By default that is the nearest 5 kg (or 10 lb), so every rung is loadable with a standard plate set. Tick I have micro plates and the rounding tightens to 2.5 kg / 5 lb. It changes fewer rungs than you would think — 70 % of 60 kg is 42 kg, which becomes 40 kg without micro plates and 42.5 kg with them.

The top single is one rep at about 90 %, added automatically once the working weight is heavy enough (60 kg / 135 lb) for that extra priming to be worth the fatigue. Turn it off for a day when you would rather save the effort, or on for a heavy single you want to feel first. If 90 % rounds onto the same load as the set below it, the ramp is left alone rather than repeating a weight.

Turn Barbell liftoff for dumbbells, machines and cables: there is no empty bar to warm up with, so the ramp starts at the first percentage instead. And a working weight at or below the bar — or under 10 kg / 25 lb — needs no ramp at all; go straight to your working set.

These are starting numbers, not a prescription. On a day when the first rung feels heavy, add a set; on a day it feels like nothing, drop one. The percentages come from the same generator the Forte app uses inside a workout.