Warming up for spring sport: what actually prevents injury

What warming up actually does

A warm up does a few things that are not in dispute. It lifts muscle temperature and blood flow, so muscle and tendon become more compliant and contract faster. It wakes the nervous system up, so you produce force more quickly and land and change direction with better control. It takes joints through the range you are about to use at speed. And it gives you a few honest minutes of feedback about how the body is travelling that morning, which is often how a niggle gets picked up before it becomes a real injury.

What it does not do is undo a winter on the couch. A warm up prepares tissue that has been trained for the task, and it cannot create capacity that was never built. That is the honest limit of the evidence, and it is why the routines that reduce injuries are really training programs that happen to sit at the start of a session, rather than a ritual performed before one.

The programs with real evidence behind them

The strongest evidence sits in team sports with running, cutting and landing, and mostly in the lower limb. The FIFA 11+ is the reference case: a structured routine of roughly 20 minutes built from running drills, then strength, plyometric and balance work including the Nordic hamstring exercise, then running with changes of direction. Trials in amateur and youth football have reported fewer injuries in the teams that completed it regularly, and the benefit tracks with attendance, which is a strong hint about where the effect actually comes from.

The Nordic hamstring exercise deserves its own mention, because the evidence for it is unusually consistent: programs that include it have reduced hamstring strain rates across a number of trials in football and other running sports. The catch is just as consistent. Uptake in real teams is poor, the first couple of weeks make you genuinely sore, and the protective effect is not something you keep once the exercise stops. It works when it becomes furniture, loaded through preseason and kept ticking over in season.

Netball and cricket

Netball Australia's KNEE program applies the same logic to netball: landing technique, balance and knee control drills built into the warm up, aimed at the landing and cutting injuries that dominate the sport. The netball research base is thinner than football's, so treat it as a sensible application of a well supported idea rather than a heavily trialled program in its own right. Cricket sits further out again. For a fast bowler the bigger risk sits in bowling workload rather than in the warm up, so the same attention belongs on how quickly overs are built back up.

Static stretching before sport: the honest verdict

This is the part people argue about, so here is where the evidence sits. Static stretching before sport has not been shown to meaningfully reduce injury risk. The trials that tested it are mostly small, the results are mixed, and the reviews that pool them do not find a protective effect worth building a warm up around. If you have been told your hamstring tore because you did not stretch enough, that is not what the research supports.

There is a second, smaller point. Long static holds can briefly reduce force, power and sprint performance afterwards, which matters if you stretch and then immediately sprint. The practical answer is not to ban stretching. It is to move it: use dynamic movement through range in the warm up, and keep longer holds for after training, or for a session of their own if a genuine range restriction is being worked on.

Where stretching does earn its place is in specific range problems, an ankle that will not bend far enough at the front, a shoulder that will not get overhead, and in the plain fact that some people feel better for it. Feeling better is a reasonable goal on its own. It is just not injury prevention, and treating it as though it were is how a squad ends up with a warm up that ticks a box and changes nothing.

Building a warm up the team will actually do

The structure that survives contact with a real training night is simple and always in the same order. Raise: easy running, skipping and side steps until you are warm and slightly puffed. Activate and strengthen: calf, hamstring, glute and single leg work, which is where the injury prevention actually lives. Mobilise: take hips, ankles and trunk through the range the sport demands, moving rather than holding. Potentiate: build up to sharp, at speed, sport specific efforts so that the first hard effort of the session is not the first hard effort of the day.

Two things decide whether it works, and neither is the exercise selection. The first is that it happens every session rather than on game day only, because the strength and control components need repeated exposure to change anything. The second is that it is short enough and specific enough that nobody quietly cuts it when the session runs late. A routine of about 15 to 20 minutes that the whole squad does together will do more than a longer one that gets skipped.

Training on your own

Training on your own follows the same order, and the honest minimum is smaller: a few minutes of easy running, the strength work that matters for your sport and your injury history, then a build up to speed before the first hard effort. The part you cannot skip is the strength work, because that is the part with the evidence attached.

Load matters at least as much as the warm up

Every September we see the same pattern, and it is rarely a warm up problem. Nothing through winter, then three sessions and a trial game in the first week. A cricketer who bowls more overs in one session than in the previous two months put together. A netballer whose body has done nothing lateral since March being asked to defend for four quarters. The warm up did not cause those injuries, and a better one would not have prevented them.

Two levers do the work, and they sit alongside each other: build the load back gradually over weeks rather than in one keen fortnight, and put a structured warm up with real strength content into every session. Sleep, and how well the last niggle was actually rehabilitated, sit close behind. If you are carrying something that never fully settled, that is the thing to sort out before preseason rather than during it.

At PACT we are happy to go through a warm up with you at our Miranda clinic or by telehealth, build the strength side around your sport and your injury history, and be honest about what a program can and cannot change. If a niggle is already there, get it looked at while it is still small. Pain that sharpens during a session, swelling that comes up afterwards, or a muscle that gave way with a sudden grab is worth an assessment rather than another week of pushing through.