Warming up should not be overlooked.

The primary goal of a warm up is to prepare yourself for the workout at hand. It lubricates joints to prevent a serious injury and puts blood into your working muscles.

NOW WHY DOES THIS HELP YOU BUILD MUSCLE?

Let’s take the bench press for example. The primary goal of benching is to grow your chest. Without warming up first, not only would you be weaker because you are not primed to lift the weight but the secondary muscles will take over, like your front deltoids. If your front delts take over, not only are you rounding your shoulders leading to injury but your chest isn’t activating as much. Less activation means less muscle growth.

HOW TO COMBAT THIS ?

Doing things like banded warmups to get some blood circulation is good but also doing specific warm ups for the muscle working that session should be done, like lighter weight on the same exercise and building up to a top set.

On a chest day, do a set of pec flies before your main pressing movement, and when you go onto your pressing movement do 3-4 warm up sets and make sure your reps on the warm up look like your top set reps, start as you mean to finish. Don’t exhaust yourself, do about 12 reps with your 30 rep max, then 8 with your 20 rep max, 5 with your 10 rep max then 1 or 2 with your 6-8 rep max. Then for every other exercise just do 1 warm up set to acclimatise to the movement, and you’ll be good to go.

One more thing to mention. That one clicking, aching shoulder could have been prevented and fixed, if you just learn to warm up.