The Importance of a good warm-up!
Should I warm-up before sports
In several studies linked below, it has been found that by having a consistent warm-up routine, players in most sports will reduce the likelihood of an injury. The old thinking was that stretching before a game was good enough to “warm-up” the tissues for sports. What seems to be more the case is that by warming up, players are activating the neural pathways that their brain uses to co-ordinate their muscular firing patterns. Without this activation, it appears more likely that the player will have a hiccup in their co-ordination of muscle firing. If this hiccup occurs during a period of high intensity performance, muscle pulls, ligament and tendon tearing, cartilage damage and other injuries can occur.
The point of this is that the warm-up in sports is incredibly important. It’s needed to remind your brain of what it is that you are going to be doing. What seems to be important is that it is consistent as well. From the start to the end of the season, the warm-up should be done the same way every single time. One of the things I’ve found when coaching teams was that after a period where players had been inactive for a pro-longed period of time (e.g. sitting around in between games), we didn’t change the specific warm-up routine, but rather increased the number of repetitions and duration based on the how poor the response when initially starting the routine (e.g. players dragging their feet to get started). Our warm-up times typically started 45 minutes before a game, which in many sports would be considered an unheard of amount of time to warm-up.
What about those who still get injured? Well, injuries may still happen. The purpose here is to reduce the number of injuries. If there was a way of completely eliminating injuries in sports, we would have used that strategy but I suspect (but cannot prove) that most injuries are a result of underconditioning for the demands of competition. That however, is a separate topic.
1. Hübscher M. et al., Neuromuscular training for sports injury prevention: a systematic review., Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2010 Mar;42(3):413-21.
2. Herman K. et al., The effectiveness of neuromuscular warm-up strategies, that require no additional equipment, for preventing lower limb injuries during sports participation: a systematic review. BMC Med. 2012 Jul 19;10:75.
3. Emery et al., Effectiveness of a home-based balance-training program in reducing sports-related injuries among healthy adolescents: a cluster randomized controlled trial. CMAJ. 2005 Mar 15; 172(6):749-754.
