Warm-Ups: Why & How To Get Your Athletes To Buy In?
/(3-5 Minute Read)
About 15 years ago, while training groups in my military unit, I tried implementing some basic movements prior to our training sessions like lunges, quick hops, planks and other body weight movements and being thought of as crazy. I mean, why are we not just standing in a circle and reaching to the sky and touching our toes. Fast forward those 15 years and we are much more educated on the warm-up process and a version of a dynamic warm-up is utilized across the country prior to almost every practice, game or training session.
So, while you the coach may be more educated, we still battle daily with “convincing” our athletes to buy in to the warm up process and how they will benefit from it. There are two important steps for athletes: The Why and The How. Each will help you as a coach get the “buy in” that you are seeking from your athletes and help them become fully engaged during the warm up process.
The Why.
Why should we warm up? If I had a nickel for every time an athlete asked me this I would retire tomorrow. To many athletes themselves, this seemed to be such a frivolous portion of their workout and skipping it seemed like a better alternative versus doing it. As coaches, most of you have read or already know why you warm up. This provides the body time to gradually prepare for the session, whether it is a practice, a game, a workout or agility session and to reduce the chances of injury. By warming the body up, the muscles are activated and engaged and ready for the session to come.
While years ago I had to convince coaches why it was important to warm up properly prior to a session or practice, the hardest part of The Why today, is convincing the athletes to buy in. This is where educating came in. Much like the questions we ask our athletes to gauge their energy for the day, we used that 10 minutes to educate them on their own bodies and how they felt.
We also try to directly correlate how they feel from both energy level and flexibility/mobility perspective to the warm-ups they performed prior to the main lift or running session that day. Especially when an athlete has a great workout, we ask them if they felt any different today. Many times those athletes say that they were more engaged in the warm-up or did “x,y,z” during the warm-up instead of their normal routine and it felt better.
Once they learned why we warmed up and rolled out and felt the difference they experienced in reducing soreness and increase in energy we didn’t have to sell that idea anymore. The primary reason most athletes came in 5 minutes early isn’t because we demanded it. It is because they learned that they felt better rolling out their bodies prior to warming up. They understood The Why.
The How.
Every workout session, whether it is a training, agility or conditioning day, we had a planned warm up for that day. Our basic template would consist of: simple, basic movements to slowly build up the body, stationary iso movements, dynamic movements and some power/explosive exercises. Typically we would have a portion outside while performing more dynamic style exercises and another portion inside that was more stationary. However, during those 10 minutes that we are observing and asking questions and gauging our athletes, we would get their input as well on what they are wanting to do that day. This gives them some of the power and lets them choose what they think would be best for them.
The more your athletes learn The Why and get in tune with their bodies, they will carry that over into the warm up selections. We loved this. A warm up is (for the most part) a warm up. There is no specific warm up that is going to provide much greater results (within reason) than another. With us allowing our athletes to have input, we always stuck with a basic template and also made sure that if we felt an athlete needed to do a specific exercise because of previous injury or related issues, that we stuck to our guns. We provided out athletes with options: would you rather do ladder drills or some power movements; rather do hurdle drills or stationary hip movements; inside or outside. These basic options gave them a sense of ownership in the workout and also allowed them to dig deeper into how they feel after certain exercises and how that would directly affect their performance.
Action Item:
During your next warm up, get a sense of how they are feeling and educate them on the correlation between warm-ups/cool downs and how they feel. If they feel tight, give them an exercise to make them feel better. This will immediately win them over. Also, work on giving them some of the power. This helps with the buy in and can quickly shift someone who isn’t engaged to someone fully engaged. Keep your template but give them options.