The Warm Up: Part 1
Republic of Ireland National Team warming up before a recent friendly.
The warm up exists for a variety of reasons. Its main purposes are:
- Increase core muscle temperature.
- Increase transmission rate of nerve impulses – the impulses that translate a decision into an action.
- Increase blood flow to the working muscles.
- Increased preparedness and mental focus.
All these allow for faster actions in your sport and greater force output from the muscles. Unfortunately, some of the warm ups I’ve been lucky enough to see (or unlucky depending one what way you look at it), don’t even come close to achieving one of these objectives. It turns into laps of the pitch or lines with nonsense running, effectively wasting valuable time with players. To put this into perspective let’s just say you have your group of players for 1 hour, once a week, not including a match. Most warm ups will take between 10-15 minutes. Over the course of a month, that’s an hour that you have wasted conducting a poor warm up. Over the course of a season it’s almost 10 hours of development they’ve lost, hours you can never get back. In the coaching world, time is a precious commodity so we need to use it wisely. The less time you have, the more continuous in nature in needs to be.
@YLMSportScience present the basics of a warm up here:
Before developing your own warm up, you must consider the following factors:
Context:
The first and most important thing that should be considered is the context in which the warm up is being performed. The warm ups objective is to prepare you for subsequent exercise and as such should change based on the content of your session, be it a match or training. If the session is going to contain a lot of repeated sprints, then the warm up should reflect that in the sense that they should spend the final moments of the warm up performing near maximal sprints and movements. If the players are due to play SSG or other activities requiring numerous changes of directions and reactive movements, then these should be contained in the warm up. Likewise, in heavy contact sports (rugby and GAA), it is reasonable to include some form of contact work in the warm up. The warm up should be viewed as a sort of movement preparation for whatever type of activity the body is going to be subjected to with gradually increasing intensity.
Age Appropriate:
The players age needs to be considered. Bearing in mind the previous article and the content on maturation, as players grow physically, this growth needs to be accounted for in your preparation. An U11 doesn’t need to perform the same movements and activation exercises that an U16 player would need. With the U11, your time can be better spent on co-ordination, reactive agility and technical/tactical work. The younger player’s muscles are not yet developed enough to have any great need to perform specific stretching exercises. However, as coaches we have a duty to continuously reinforce the importance of why we warm up with our players, not necessarily how.
Standard of Player:
Rather than being scientifically rooted, this one is more of a personal opinion, one of which I’m open to discussion on. If you are in charge of a player or group of players, it’s your duty to do your best for them. If they are on the ‘weaker’ end of the spectrum in terms of technical ability, then I’m a firm believer of spending more time on technical based exercises in a warm up. If there is a huge deficiency in an area of their game, then you could use the warm up to work on it. For example, if they are poor at passing the ball, instead of lining players up in lines and getting them to jog up and down a couple of times for 2 minutes, get them doing an unopposed passing exercise moving into an opposed practise. You can still stretch intermittently throughout these exercises but now they are reaping the benefit of being able to improve on a weakness. The trouble with this occurs if you spend too much time on one area and the quality is poor. The warm up is as much of a psychological phase as it is physical. It’s a chance for the players to focus in on their roles and responsibilities, whilst building confidence going into a game/training session. By focusing too long on the area of weakness and without providing a period of success for the players you risk affecting mental preparation of some of your players. The beauty of coaching is knowing when to push and when to pull to get the best from your players.
Context:
The first and most important thing that should be considered is the context in which the warm up is being performed. The warm ups objective is to prepare you for subsequent exercise and as such should change based on the content of your session, be it a match or training. If the session is going to contain a lot of repeated sprints, then the warm up should reflect that in the sense that they should spend the final moments of the warm up performing near maximal sprints and movements. If the players are due to play SSG or other activities requiring numerous changes of directions and reactive movements, then these should be contained in the warm up. Likewise, in heavy contact sports (rugby and GAA), it is reasonable to include some form of contact work in the warm up. The warm up should be viewed as a sort of movement preparation for whatever type of activity the body is going to be subjected to with gradually increasing intensity.
Age Appropriate:
The players age needs to be considered. Bearing in mind the previous article and the content on maturation, as players grow physically, this growth needs to be accounted for in your preparation. An U11 doesn’t need to perform the same movements and activation exercises that an U16 player would need. With the U11, your time can be better spent on co-ordination, reactive agility and technical/tactical work. The younger player’s muscles are not yet developed enough to have any great need to perform specific stretching exercises. However, as coaches we have a duty to continuously reinforce the importance of why we warm up with our players, not necessarily how.
Standard of Player:
Rather than being scientifically rooted, this one is more of a personal opinion, one of which I’m open to discussion on. If you are in charge of a player or group of players, it’s your duty to do your best for them. If they are on the ‘weaker’ end of the spectrum in terms of technical ability, then I’m a firm believer of spending more time on technical based exercises in a warm up. If there is a huge deficiency in an area of their game, then you could use the warm up to work on it. For example, if they are poor at passing the ball, instead of lining players up in lines and getting them to jog up and down a couple of times for 2 minutes, get them doing an unopposed passing exercise moving into an opposed practise. You can still stretch intermittently throughout these exercises but now they are reaping the benefit of being able to improve on a weakness. The trouble with this occurs if you spend too much time on one area and the quality is poor. The warm up is as much of a psychological phase as it is physical. It’s a chance for the players to focus in on their roles and responsibilities, whilst building confidence going into a game/training session. By focusing too long on the area of weakness and without providing a period of success for the players you risk affecting mental preparation of some of your players. The beauty of coaching is knowing when to push and when to pull to get the best from your players.
Keep an eye out for Part 2! Part 2 will break down the stages of the warm up so you can build your very own effective warm up routine for your players.
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