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Warm-Up Set Calculator

How this is calculated

The ramp is four sets at 40, 55, 70 and 85 percent of your working weight, for five, five, three and two reps. Every weight is then rounded down to something you can actually load with the plates you ticked, so the numbers on screen match the bar in front of you.

Percentages rather than fixed jumps, because the same absolute jump means different things at different strengths. Going from 60 to 80 kg is a third of the load; going from 160 to 180 is an eighth. A ramp built on percentages scales with you and does not need rewriting every time your working weight moves.

Reps fall as the weight rises for a plain reason: a warm-up is meant to prepare you for the working set, not to eat into it. Five reps at 40 percent cost almost nothing and get blood into the muscle. Five reps at 85 percent would be a working set of its own, and you would pay for it later in the session. Two reps there are enough to rehearse the heavy groove.

Sets that come out below the bar are dropped, and so are duplicates. On light working weights the first two or three rungs all round down to the bare bar, and being told to warm up three times at the same weight is noise, not instruction.

There is no single paper behind this ladder. It is the shape of warm-up that is standard across strength training, not a published formula, and honest to present as such. Treat it as a sensible default, not a prescription: if you know you need more rungs on a heavy squat day or fewer on an overhead press, adjust it. The calculator saves you the arithmetic, not the judgement.