Warm-Up

A simple change to improve your entire practice

Running a good warm-up is an underappreciated art of coaching. Thousands of resources have been devoted to creating good warm-ups, an unbelievable amount of time has been spent teaching coaches how to run good warm-ups, and yet there’s still a large subsection of coaches that get it wrong.

Real World Example

I once worked with a coach who had one of the highest club positions in the state. Before a match, he asked his assistant coach to run the team through 25 minutes of agility work before the pregame warm-up even began.

A few months prior to this incident, I attended an exclusive presentation/Q&A session with David Tenney, former Orlando Magic’s and current Austin FC’s High Performance Director. During that meeting, Tenney said a pregame warm-up, that sufficiently prepares players for matches, can be completed in 25 minutes total. The juxtaposition between these two moments highlights the disconnect that still exists today between best coaching practices and those who implement them at the youth levels.

Importance of Warm-Ups

As I’ve said before, I strongly believe that the first 15 minutes of practice sets the tone for the rest of the session. If you want to have a great training session, it must begin with a great warm-up.

Warm-ups prime players along physical, mental, emotional, and social lines. On the physical side, warm-ups have two main objectives: decreasing the risk of injury, and preparing the body to perform at its highest level.

Injury Prevention

Decreasing injury is the most important objective. Athlete’s don’t have to worry about their body’s top performance when they’re in the process of recovery. Injury prevention is particularly important for young women who are prone to higher rates of major ACL injuries.

The first season I worked with collegiate-aged women I had two athletes tear their ACLs. At the beginning of the next season, we introduced three simple exercises into all of our warm-ups, and had zero incidents of ACL injuries that year.

The three exercises can be found in this video: basic squats, lateral bounds, and dead lifts. For dead lifts, we didn’t have weights on the field, so players just leaned forward and touched the toes of their standing foot.

It was a tiny modification to what we were already doing but it substantially increased player safety and health. While this example is pertinent to young women, obviously all soccer players, regardless of age or biological predispositions, are at increased risk of ACL injury compared to other sports.

There’s other ACL injury prevention exercises that can be mixed into dynamic warm-ups as well. Regardless of the exercises selected though, all athletes should regularly perform exercises that strengthen and decrease the risk of injury for the major muscle groups that are activated when playing soccer. This includes hamstrings, quadriceps, calves, and lower back.

Dynamic Stretching

Along with injury prevention, a good warm-up will prepare players to physically compete at their top level.

Broadly speaking, a physical warm-up will take 10-15 minutes to complete and will gradually increase intensity until an an athlete’s heart rate is at 90% capacity – i.e. athletes are sprinting. It’s worth noting that after physically warming-up, players need to warm-up technically – their first touch on the ball should not come after the game has started – but this article will focus only on the physical preparation.

The first 5 minutes or so of the warm-up should be low-intensity exercises: jogging, skipping, side shuffles, etc. Following that, players should engage in dynamic stretching for about 7 minutes, and the final minutes should be spent on sprint work.

It’s important to highlight that the stretching should be done while players are moving. This is called dynamic stretching, and a simple Google/YouTube search will give you plenty to run your players through.

Dynamic stretching’s counterpart is static stretching, which is the equivalent of yoga, where athletes perform and hold a stretch for extended amounts of time. However, static stretching can decrease explosive strength (accelerating, jumping, kicking, etc.) by up to 20% for the following 24 hours! This means if you want to prepare players for optimal performance, they should engage in dynamic stretching before competitions.

(To be clear though, there is a time and place for static stretching during cool downs, recovery sessions, and balance training.)

There are always coaches who are pushing the bounds of what this sport looks like, and that includes pregame warm-ups. One such coach is Oscar “Profe” Ortega, the conditioning coach for Atletico Madrid. Below is a video of him running the starting eleven through a pregame warm-up in a way that blew my mind the first time I saw it.

Directional Dynamic Stretching

Dynamic and static stretches are usually performed in linear ways; meaning they either go straight forwards/backwards or out to the side. However, soccer is not a linear sport. On the field, players are constantly performing diagonal changes of direction and circular sweeping motions. Therefore, when performing dynamic stretching in the warm-up phase, it’s important to activate the muscle groups that will actually be used when playing the sport.

Example: Most lunges are performed vertically. A player steps forward, sinks their knee down, then stands up and repeats the action on the other side. It’s a good exercise for activating quadriceps, but it doesn’t match game-like moments.

Along with lateral squats, players should perform a set of diagonal lunges, as if their feet were in corners of a box diagonally opposite from each other. This specifically activates the adductors that will be used when making diagonal cuts in the match.

Social Setting

Warm-ups can reveal a lot about the social fabric of a team. Years ago, I joined a set of players who never said a word to each other during the warm-ups before practices and games. Take a second to imagine what that looked and felt like. Do you think that team performed well? Do you think they enjoyed spending time together?

Warm-ups present a great opportunity to build and reinforce a cohesive team culture. During every warm-up I speak with each player – I greet them, ask questions, then bring other players and coaches into the conversation. The end goal is for players to take ownership of this social leadership where players begin group conversations naturally.

I’ve seen many coaches (myself included) step away from teams when they warm themselves up, and that is the ideal outcome in many regards. However, you want to ensure that every player is speaking, or at least feels comfortable doing so. When only a small subset of players converse, it’s easy to mistakenly generalize that dynamic across the entire team. Creating a comfortable social atmosphere takes time, and it’s helpful to show and explain to players why it’s desirable, and how it’s a leadership skill that can be applied to their lives outside of soccer as well.

In short, like all other skills, players need to practice speaking to each other. If they don’t use their voice in low-stakes setting, there’s no way they’ll speak up during competitive matches. There are some people who need silence to create the right mental/emotional zone to optimize performance, and coaches should provide the necessary space to do so. But when a team is quiet before matches, it’s easy for players to interpret that silence as nerves, anxiety, or plain discomfort – all of which negatively impact performance. A simple solution is to use warm-ups not only as a jump-starter for physical performance, but to increase social cohesion as well.

Routine for Games

Warm-ups need to act as a mental cue. When players warm-up they should subconsciously realize that it’s time to focus and prepare for physical performance. By not having a set warm-up routine, particularly for pregame, players will struggle to consistently enter a competitive mindset.

Too often I see coaches try to teach something new before a game, whether it’s a new exercise or a new tactical concept. Teaching new content to players before games is unproductive for a few reasons: 1) players will not remember anything just taught to them once they’re in the heat of the match, thus it becomes a waste of time. 2) Players can become frustrated when they’re presented with something they don’t understand, and that’s an emotion you want to avoid before kickoff. 3) Players will be spending mental energy that they’ll need for the match about to start.

Some coaches won’t teach new things but they will have a different warm-up before each game. Again, this robs players of having a familiar pregame routine that they can use to enter the correct head space. Time will be wasted as players are told what to do next when they should already be doing something tried and trued. Preferably, players will be taught and use visualization techniques, but if they don’t know what to expect when they step on the field then their visualization work will be for nothing.

Ideally, players will know their pregame warm-up before they arrive on the field. Before the first game of every season, I will spend an entire training session running through the warm-up, performing and perfecting the exercises, and making sure each players know what is expected of them to make the exercises run smoothly. With older players, we will meet and develop a warm-up routine together to ensure players are getting what they need to feel physically, technically, and mentally prepared.

Wrapping up Warm-ups

Obviously there’s more to warm-ups than a short blog post can cover. This is merely a primer and doesn’t address how warm-ups can change based on a player’s development pathway, nor does it address how technical ball skills can be incorporated into the warm-up phase. But in broad strokes, physical warm-ups should decrease risk of injury, activate core muscle groups for optimal performance, strengthen the collaborative culture, and give a sense of familiarity. If the first 10-15 minutes of your training sessions start this way every time (especially for players U13 and up) the rest of your practice will automatically become better.