Sport Specific Warm up

Recently there has been increased research into having a sport specific warm-up attempting to reduce the amount of injuries that happen through a sport season.  Another article just came out looking at a D1 collegiate soccer team stating a sport specific warm up that helped reduce injuries suffered throughout the year.  There have been many studies similar to this one, begging the question why doesn’t every team perform one of these warm-ups?  They often take the same amount of time that a traditional warm-up does, do not require much or any extra equipment and can be run by the teams’ athletic trainer or coach.  

These warm-ups are not only for collegiate athletes, but for everyone of all ages. Dr. Heather Bergeson spoke to OSR's staff on adolescent overuse injuries today. One key point as part of injury prevention was to include dynamic warm ups. 

Here is a link to the article with an example soccer specific warm-up. 

The goals of these warm-ups are to reduce common injuries in a sport by performing prehab, or preventative rehabilitation.  For soccer this could be ankle sprains or ACL injuries.  From here the Athletic Trainer can create a sport specific warm-up with rehab exercises.  By training the muscle properly from the beginning they will be able to work properly and help reduce the amount of injuries over multiple seasons.  

The key to the warm-up is that it needs to be easy to perform and continually progressive.  If the athletes are not continually pushed they will not make gains and will plateau.  The progressions will also help reduce any boredom that can occur when exercises become repetitive.  

The first half of this video can be used as a baseline to start your dynamic warm up for any sport:

If you are interested in having a sport specific warm-up for your team please contact OSR and we can help you out!

This article was written by Andrew Ernst, ATR at our Eden Prairie location.