There is a big debate among instructors and students alike as to what is the best way to warm up.
Even at the academy that I teach at there is no consensus.
I’m not going to hit all the points in this post but only to state my opinion.
The best way to warm up is to start slowly with drills to move the body and then slowly ramp up from there to positional sparring. Little by little increasing the resistance.
For instance, if I’m working my open guard. I might use the beginning of the round to review my open guard transitions and attacks just to get my mind in the right space to work on the position and my body loosened up.
The problem with this and trying to tailor your warm up to the needs of every student is that every student has different needs and what they want out of training Jiu Jitsu.
Some students want to lose weight so maybe more high intensity interval training would fit their goal better.
Some students just want to break a light sweat so maybe a running warm up would fit their needs better.
Some students want to skip the warm up all together and get right down to rolling.
And you might have many of these different types of students in one class. So trying to satisfy everyone is downright impossible and a lot of instructors take it personally when students give feedback about too much warm up or too little warmup.
I know my goal as an instructor of Jiu Jitsu is to transmit my knowledge of Jiu Jitsu as best I can while trying to do my best to cover the areas of fitness, health, and competitions etc.
So I will probably continue to prioritize techniques over everything else.
The student themselves can handle exactly how they want to warm up.