Warm-ups

Concoction of a brown guy's shower thoughts and science.

Have you ever questioned the relevance of warm-ups, why we do them and how to go about them? I’ve always been intrigued as to how some players get away without doing them and if more is really better.

My aim is to address the plaguing questions that I’ve had growing up and hopefully leave you more informed at the end of it. This is by no means a warm-up prescription but rather an attempt to make you think about whether your pre-performance routines are optimised or not. 

Disclaimer: This is the first in a series of articles that are infused with my dry and oft deviant sense of humour. While I’m using tennis as a platform to discuss warm-ups, the takeaways can be applied to other sports that combine aerobic and anaerobic requirements.

Warm-ups are much like foreplay. Do you have to do them? NOT REALLY. Are you better off doing them? HELL YES!

Some argue that warm-ups make no evolutionary sense. This makes intuitive sense in that it’s hard to picture the Australopithecus and the Homo Erectus doing shoulder dislocates before hunting. I’d argue that if you too were faced with a life or death situation, the last thing on your mind would be whether or not you did your mobility routines. In a state of fight or flight, the rise in adrenaline causes the body to increase its heart rate, redirect blood to muscles, increase strength and pain threshold, sharpen mental focus, and sweat (as a side effect of stress). Sounds like what you’d want from a good warm-up, isn’t it? Fortunately or unfortunately, tennis isn’t a life threatening activity. Conversely, this means you’ll have to spend precious minutes of your existence warming up, unless you’re Chuck Norris or Rajinikanth, or your opponent is quite literally out there to kill you. 

Bottomline: unless your opponent is a sabre-toothed tiger, the evolutionary argument to not warm up makes no sense. Moving on…

Why do we need to warm-up?

The objective of warming up is quite simply to increase body temperature. DUH! Many of you have probably been asked to warm up until you break a sweat. This is because sweating serves as an indicator of an elevated body temperature. Sweating is our body’s thermostat. Most of the ergogenic (performance enhancing) benefits of warm-ups are conferred by an increase in muscle temperature. There are some non-thermal positives to warming up as well. 

Some of the benefits are:

(A) As a tennis player you need to be explosive on court. Warming up increases your muscles’ elasticity and decreases its tendency to resist stretch (viscosity). This allows you to produce force more efficiently and be more explosive as a result.

(B) Much like a car’s engine, your body needs fuel and regular clearance of waste material (metabolic by-products) to run efficiently. Warm-ups facilitate this through vasodilation- widening of blood vessels. Wider blood vessels allows for more blood flow and thereby oxygenation, and the removal of by-products like lactate.

(C) How quickly you react could be the difference between centring the ball and framing it. Warm-ups improve your reaction time by increasing nerve conduction velocity, which is fancy speak for faster messaging between your muscles and brain. For the sake of over-simplification, what warm muscles are to 4G, cold muscles are to 2G. 

(D)Your muscles need oxygen to produce energy. Enter the Bohr effect- in warm muscles as the environment becomes more acidic, the bonds between haemoglobin and oxygen becomes weaker. This means haemoglobin (protein that transports oxygen) is all too generous to donate oxygen to your working muscles. The longer you can supply your muscles with oxygen, the better your endurance.

(E) Psychological readiness- A warm-up is not just about going through the motions. It provides you with a dedicated time to focus on the event and practice mental imagery. In my opinion, having an internal focus during the physical warm-up lets one acknowledge any aches, pains or niggles that would otherwise be missed had one been distracted. 

Now that I’ve got the boring science-y stuff out of the way, let me move on to the not-so-boring stuff. 

Does warming up prevent injuries?

Let us get it straight that you cannot prevent injuries. You can help mitigate them. We all know a player who warms up by swinging their arms and shaking their legs and this seems to suffice. This scanty limbering up seems to in fact work in their favour and they never seem to get hurt. Surely they must be outliers? Here’s what science has to say.

The scientific evidence on warming up to reduce injury risk is about as mixed as a bag of nuts. While the current consensus can’t justify warm-ups’ sacrosanct reputation, the trend does favour warming up as opposed to abandoning them. Injuries are a complex phenomenon wherein several variables are at play. The same warm up done on two different occasions can have very different outcomes indicating that there’s more to injuries than a warm up. Instead of spieling off on this (much to the demise of my ego), I’d rather exploit the brevity of a simple cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to justify the need to warm-up. 

Benefits:

1. Tennis is one of the most physically demanding sports for a reason. It requires that a player have a multitude of physical skills in their repertoire. A good player needs to have strength, power, speed, endurance and agility to name a few. Ignoring mental and technical skills, a player with better athletic prowess is bound to be more successful. A warm-up serves to ameliorate these skills helping a player fire on all cylinders.

2. You probably get to leave school 30 mins early. How cool is that?

Costs:

1. Showing up at the courts 20-30 mins earlier which probably means waking up 20-30 mins earlier. 

Conclusion: The cost of warming up is much too trivial compared to its benefits and I feel asinine trying to justify it with a CBA. Having worked at an ATP 250 event, it was fairly common for me to see pre-practice warm-ups of 30-45 minutes on average and even longer pre-match warm-ups. While a lot more research is required on this, I feel it’s imprudent to have a devil may care attitude. Remember that other variables like sleep, nutrition, hydration and stress are equally if not more important and are not-so-little things that go a long way.

Here is an article by Matt Little, Andy Murray’s S&C coach that details the attributes that place tennis players in the upper echelons of fitness.

Often times we hear of warm ups that pay tribute to the misquote “one mans warm up is another mans workout”. Some memes are even born out of this. Stories of 10km runs and repeat 400m sprints as warm up are quite common in the sports world. If you’re feeling frisky after watching Rocky or Creed and wish to dabble in such warm ups, I’d recommend against it. The intention behind such extensive warm-ups (if you can even call them that) is more mental than physical. Pros most likely use them to train mental resilience. For the vast majority of the population, there are more efficacious and less painstaking ways to warm-up. 

Bottomline: if your warm-ups leave you overreaching and under-recovering consistently, you’re doing it wrong. A great man once said “one small warm up for a man, one giant leap for his performance” or something like that. 

A good warm-up doesn’t have to elaborate. In my next article, I’ll introduce some of the key components of a warm-up, briefly detailing what research has to say and highlighting my takeaways. 

References: To give you some context as to how mixed that bag of nuts is, I’ve linked some articles for your reading pleasure. This is not an exhaustive list.

1. Safran MR, Seaber AV, Garrett WE Jr. Warm-up and muscular injury prevention. An update. Sports Med. 1989;8(4):239-249. doi:10.2165/00007256-198908040-00004

2. Fradkin AJ, Gabbe BJ, Cameron PA. Does warming up prevent injury in sport? The evidence from randomised controlled trials?. J Sci Med Sport. 2006;9(3):214-220. doi:10.1016/j.jsams.2006.03.026

3. Small K, Mc Naughton L, Matthews M. A systematic review into the efficacy of static stretching as part of a warm-up for the prevention of exercise-related injury. Res Sports Med. 2008;16(3):213-231. doi:10.1080/15438620802310784

4. Woods K, Bishop P, Jones E. Warm-up and stretching in the prevention of muscular injury. Sports Med. 2007;37(12):1089-1099. doi:10.2165/00007256-200737120-00006

5. Shellock FG, Prentice WE. Warming-up and stretching for improved physical performance and prevention of sports-related injuries. Sports Med. 1985;2(4):267-278. doi:10.2165/00007256-198502040-00004