Warm-Up Sets Calculator

A warm-up has one job: get you ready for the work set without spending the energy the work set needs. Too few rungs and your first hard set is your first heavy set — cold, and a rep or two short of what you had. Too many and you arrive at the bar already tired, warm-ups eating into the sets that actually drive progress. The right number of rungs sits between those, and it moves with how heavy you're going.

Sterka reads that from the working set's intensity relative to your one-rep max. Below 40%, the load is light enough that no warm-up set is needed — the first work sets are the warm-up. Between 40% and 65%, two rungs bring you up. At 65% and above, a third rung is added, because the jump to a genuinely heavy work set is one your joints and nervous system should meet in stages. For near-maximal strength work the ladder runs longer still — up to the five rungs the Get Stronger table above lays out — each a smaller step as the bar gets heavy.

That full ladder is earned, though. Your very first session gets one feeder set — 70% for five, or none at all if the work weight is under the ramp's floors — whatever the goal, and whatever you rated yourself at onboarding: with no completed session there is no history to read, so the shorter ramp applies at every experience level. And if your onboarding marked you as starting out, the same holds for your first 28 days on any lift you haven't logged yet, where the working weight is capped at 75% of your max on top of it. Every rung is a fraction of the work set, so a five-rung climb to a weight that isn't heavy yet just divides a light load into lighter pieces, and spends the session doing it. One feeder is all the pattern needs.

Goal shapes it too. On Get Stronger, the working sets live near your top end, so the ladder climbs higher and thinner — 92% for a single before you touch the work weight — to rehearse the movement heavy without banking fatigue. On Build Muscle, the work sits in a rep range further from failure, so a lighter three-rung ramp is enough. Rest stretches as the rungs get heavy: a few seconds after the light ones, over two minutes before the near-maximal single.

Under a light enough bar, though, the goal stops changing the answer. A barbell work set under 60 kg gets the Build Muscle rungs whichever goal you picked: the smallest plate you can add is a large fraction of that work set, so the strength ladder's tighter steps stop landing where they are aimed. Under 30 kg there is no ramp at all — at that load the work sets are the warm-up, and splitting the number into smaller ones spends the session rehearsing nothing.

That is a different rule from the 40% one above, and it overrides it. The floor is there precisely because a light bar can still read as a high fraction of a beginner's max — and the answer at that weight is still that a ramp is not worth building. Both floors are the barbell numbers, which is what the calculator above assumes, because it takes one weight and not the equipment it is on. Sterka reads the real floor off the equipment: on dumbbells, per implement, both sit lower.

The ladder here is scaled to one number. In a session, how many rungs fire depends on the lift, your history on it, and where the work set lands against your max — which is the part a calculator can show but only a program can decide.