Is Your Warm-Up Actually Preventing Injuries?
- Easton Huley
- May 4
- 2 min read
A Warm-Up Is Not a Workout: What the Research Is Finally Saying Out Loud
Warm-ups and work outs are not the same thing, and confusing the two leaves athletes trying to bridge a 1km gap with a 10m ladder. Field sports are notorious for having a phobia of lifting heavy AF, and fall back onto the comfy familiarity of intense warm-ups.
Hears the gist of the research:
The FIFA 11+ was built to prevent football injuries. On paper, it targets strength, balance, and jumping and landing ability. At first glance, it is a home run. Those are the best variables to change in order to become more resilient. However, the execution generally fails miserably. It relies on generic, body weight exercises that miss the mark in terms of signalling the the tissue to change - called progressive overload. And without progressive overload, you don't get the meaningful long-term adaptation that actually moves the needle in movement and injury limitation. The strength and movement improvements these programs promise are largely out of reach, particularly for athletes who already have a training base. The authors also flag something that often gets glossed over: the research supporting these programmes comes predominantly from youth and amateur female populations. Applying those findings broadly, across all sports, all experience levels, all bodies, overstates what the data actually shows. Even within that population, only 30% of assessed warm-up programmes met strength training guidelines.
What This Means For You
If your movement/injury limitation strategy is a 15-minute warm-up before practice or a game, you're not doing nothing, but you're definitely not doing enough.
Real injury risk reduction comes from specific, structured and intentional strength training. It comes down to adaptation and preparation. Are you inputting the variables that cause the tissue adaptation which prepares itself for the demands of sport.
What we think
This is the exact philosophy we build on. There is a gap that needs to be closed, and it is done by preparing the body with accurate movement quality, and sufficient movement capacity.