Warm-up calculator

1. What a ramp is for

A warm-up ramp is the lift itself, climbing. You start at the bar and work up to the weight you came to lift, taking fewer reps as the load rises.

It is the specific half of a warm-up. The general half, a few minutes of cardio and whatever mobility you need, raises your temperature and gets blood moving. The ramp does the other job: it rehearses the exact movement under load, so your first hard set is not the first time your body meets the pattern today.

Trained lifters move that first set faster after ramping than after nothing, in both the squat and the bench press. That effect is what this tool is built around.

2. The three ramps

Pick by what the working set is, not by what you are training for. A heavy single needs rehearsal close to the weight. A set of twelve does not, and four sets spent getting there cost more than they return.

Percentages are of your working weight, not of your one-rep max. Short is for a lift you are already warm for, either because the exercise before it hit the same muscles or because it is an accessory you are not chasing a record on.

3. Where the numbers come from

The structure holds up in the research. The exact ladder does not, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

What holds up is the heavy rung. A 2024 trial in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies had trained men warm up at 40, 60 and 80 percent of a ten-rep working load before three sets to failure, and the 80 percent condition produced the most total training volume. Two studies by Ribeiro and colleagues, in 2020 and 2021, ran a two-set ramp at 40 then 80 percent of the training load before squats and bench presses and measured higher movement velocity on the first working set, while a light-only 40 percent warm-up was not enough on its own.

The rungs under the top one come from the incremental ladders the literature uses to approach a one-rep max, which run 20, 40, 60, 80 and 90 percent. The rep counts are convention. Nobody has tested five reps at 50 percent against four, and this tool is not going to imply they have.

The counterweight, because it exists: a 2025 crossover trial found that at ten-rep loads a specific warm-up made no measurable difference to volume or perceived effort against no warm-up at all. Treat a ramp as rehearsal and insurance rather than as free performance, and treat the Short ramp as a real option on days you are already moving well.

4. Reading your ramp

Every load is the total on the bar, bar included. That is the same convention BDYCTRL uses on every screen with a weight on it, and how weight is counted has the whole rule.

• A percentage landing under the bar becomes an empty-bar set, because you cannot load less than the bar
• Loads round to your smallest jump, and every jump on offer is twice a plate you can pick up, so no rung lands at a weight nobody sells
• Two rungs that round to the same load become one, which is why a light working weight gives a shorter ramp than a heavy one

The grey line under a rung is the plates for one end of the bar, largest first, from the standard commercial set. Load that on both ends, add the bar, and you have the number on the right. It always resolves, because the rounding is applied to the plates rather than to the total.

Bar weights are the app's own, and the app defines them in kilos: 20, 15 and 7.5. Switch to pounds and the same three read 44, 33 and 16.5, here and on the app's bar chips, which is a pound under the 45 lb bar most American gyms rack. Set the working weight you actually lift and the ramp lands where it should either way.

Rest long enough to arrive fresh, and longer as the load climbs. There are no rest numbers in the table because none have been tested, and inventing four of them would undo the point of section 3.

5. Logging the ramp in the app

BDYCTRL does not build ramps for you. What it does is keep them out of your numbers: tag a set as a warm-up and it is logged and shown, but never counted toward your working volume, your estimated one-rep max or your analytics. Light singles cannot drag those down.

Set types, and what they count covers the tagging, one tap per row. Get the app.