By Peter Larson
In my previous post on the importance of a warm-up for jumpers (and other speed and power athletes), I outlined research showing that a warm-up consisting of approximately 800-1000m of light running plus dynamic stretching drills can significantly increase vertical jump height performance when compared to no warm-up at all or just static stretching. As coaches, this makes sense, but it can often be a struggle to get our athletes to listen to our pleas to take their warm-up seriously, and short of monitoring every single athlete at all times during a track meet (an impossible task!), it is likely that our best efforts will never result in all of our athletes doing the right things to prepare for their events.
My hope is that providing some hard data will allow you to at least convince some of your athletes that warming up will improve performance, and in this post we will dig a little more into the topic by addressing two questions which may help to guide development of warm-up routines for our speed and power athletes:
- How intense should our general warm-up be (how hard/fast should athletes run, bike, etc.)?
- What effect does the timing of our warm-up prior to competing have?
The first question is one I have grappled with frequently with my sprinters and jumpers. They mostly hate doing warm-up laps at the beginning of practice, even if they acknowledge their value to performance and injury prevention. They also often complain they run their laps too fast because they do them with our distance runners, who naturally have a much faster “easy” pace. We often do a team talk and event specific practice overviews after the warm-up, so it might be 20-30 minutes after the warm-up before they actually begin their workout, at which point they are cold again (especially outside during winter track and early spring track in NH). Furthermore, at meets athletes may warm up before the meet begins, but forget to warm up again if they have been sitting around waiting for their events to begin. Maybe research can guide us to a better way of doing things as coaches – self-reflection and learning are important parts of the coaching practice!
To address the questions posed above, let’s dig in to some research to help provide us with some answers. A team of researchers form Japan, led by Ryo Tsurubami, published a study in 2020 in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine specifically focused on the effects of warm-up intensity and timing on vertical jump performance. As in my previous post on this topic, the type of jump performed was a countermovement jump, where the athletes squatted rapidly and then burst upward from a standing position on a force plate. What is particularly cool about this study is that they determined both the V02max and lactate threshold for each participant so they could specifically tailor workout intensity to their individual fitness. Using this information, they had each subject run a 15 minute warm-up on a treadmill at one of the following intensity levels:
- 80% of VO2max (high intensity, faster pace)
- 60% of VO2max (low intensity, slower pace)
The subjects came in on multiple days and performed the different warm-up routines, followed by a series of tests conducted before and either immediately after the warm-up, 10 minutes after the warm-up, or 20 minutes after the warm-up. The tests conducted included:
- Countermovement Vertical Jump Height
- Temperature of the vastus lateralis muscle (lateral quad)
- Heart Rate
- Subjective Fatigue (scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being “too tired to walk”; as an aside, I think many of my athletes might rate themselves as a 10 after their easy warm-up laps every day – subjective fatigue for them can be wildly off sometimes!)
On to the good bits – what did they find?
The graphs below show the results of this research. The dark bars are the high intensity warm-up group, medium gray bars are the low intensity warm-up group, and the light bars are the no warm-up group. What you can see is that both warm-ups increased heart rate, muscle temperature, subjective fatigue, and vertical jump height immediately afterward. The latter supports the results discussed in my previous post – warm-ups work, and they significantly improve jumping performance regardless of intensity!
Image from Tsurubami et. al, Journal of Sports Science and Medicine (2020) 19, 714-720
What is particularly interesting here though is the differences between the two intensities as they relate to the lasting effects of the warm-up. Specifically, a high intensity warm-up of 15 min of running at 80% of VO2max ( a pretty brisk pace) provides benefits to vertical jump height which last up to 20 minutes after the warm-up is complete, whereas the benefit of the low intensity warm-up to jump height is pretty much gone after 10 minutes. However, the intense warmup causes higher subjective fatigue, so it might not be the best choice if competing immediately afterward. The upshot is timing of a warm-up is extremely important as it relates to the intensity of the warmup. The following rules of thumb might help to summarize:
- If the warm-up is to be done immediately before competing in an event or no more than 10 minutes after, a low-intensity warm-up will help improve performance and causes less subjective fatigue than a high intensity warmup
- If the warm-up is done 10 or more minutes before the event, a higher intensity warm-up will provide more lasting benefits (at least up to 20 minutes, which is the longest time measure in this study) and post-warmup fatigue will decline in time for the event.
- Both types of warm-ups seem to increase muscle temperature in a way that lasts up to 20 minutes afterward (I hope to address the benefit of this in a future post), so a low intensity warm-up 20 minutes before the event with some high intensity activity like drills or strides right before the event might help to reactivate the benefits of the low-intensity warm-up (this is me speculating, and was not addressed in the study).
Taking all of this information into account, I know that getting my sprinters and jumpers to run for 15 minutes would be a battle I might not easily win, particularly if they were left to their own devices at a meet. So as a means of compromise, and taking the results of the study discussed in my previous post into account, I think a reasonable approach to a warm-up for jumpers and other power athletes would be the following:
If competing immediately after the warm-up or within 10 or so minutes:
- 800-1000m of warm-up jogging at a self-selected pace
- 3-5 x strides at increasing intensity with each rep
- Drills – maybe 2 sets of 5 drills chosen as appropriate for a given event (as an example, for a long or triple jumper I might include high knees, butt kicks, bounding, skipping, carioca, etc.)
If competing 10-20 minutes or more after the warm-up:
- 800-1000m of warm-up jogging at a steadily increasing pace (finishing at a pace that feels “hard”)
- 3-5 x strides at increasing intensity with each rep (probably better performed just before event start)
- Drills – maybe 2 sets of 5 drills chosen as appropriate for a given event (probably better performed just before event start)
As a form of self-reflection while I have been going down the warm-up research rabbit-hole, I have also begun to question my own coaching practice. For example, I am consdering the logic of doing our team warm-up first, then taking 15-20 minutes to do a general team talk followed by event-specific practice overviews. Some days, it might be 30 minutes or more before the athletes actually start doing their workouts (figuring in additional time to change into spikes, get equipment out, goof around…), at which point the benefits of warming up might have begun to dissipate or disappear entirely. Making sure warm-ups occur within a 20 or so minute window before a workout seems to make sense, so maybe the team talk before the warm-up is something to explore in the future.
I hope this dive into research helps to inform your coaching practice – I learn a lot myself from looking at actual research results, and it often leads to the type of self-reflection I mentioned earlier. As coaches, it’s important to not get stuck in a routine because it’s what “we’ve always done.” Just as we coach student athletes, we need to be open to being students of our sport – be open to new ideas, be willing to experiment, and have fun in the process!
