Lesson 1

Why the Warm-Up Decides Everything

The warm-up is not a formality, it is the first training session of the day. What it has to achieve, and why most athletes get it wrong.

5:10 min Free

The situation

The warm-up is the first session of the day

In football, warming up usually means two laps of the pitch, some stretching and a passing drill. That is enough not to start training cold. It is not enough to sprint maximally twenty minutes later.

A maximal sprint demands several times body weight in force at every single ground contact, with a contact time of about a tenth of a second. An easy jog does not prepare you for that — neither the muscles nor the nervous system that has to drive them.

If your first sprint in training is noticeably slower than your third, your warm-up has not done its job. That is the simplest test you have.

How a warm-up is built

RaiseMobilise ActivatePotentiate 5 min5 min 5 min7 min Raise temperatureand blood flow Make range ofmovement available Make the right musclesavailable to recruit Bring the nervous systemup to top speed Intensity and demand rise across the whole duration. Each block builds on the one before — potentiation without prior activation does not work, and nor does activation without temperature. After Ian Jeffreys’ RAMP model, which treats Mobilise and Activate as a single block.

The order is not arbitrary. Starting with build-up runs skips the prerequisites for them and delivers neither the performance nor the protection the warm-up exists for.

The structure

Four blocks in a fixed order

The approach that has established itself in the field comes from Ian Jeffreys and goes by the acronym RAMP. It orders the warm-up by what physically builds on what, rather than by habit.

1Raise — bring temperature, heart rate and blood flow up.
2Mobilise — make available the range of motion the sprint demands.
3Activate — make the muscles that will do the work drivable.
4Potentiate — bring the nervous system up to the speed about to be required.

The order is not optional. Activation barely works in cold muscle, and potentiation does not work if the muscles involved have not been driven first. Jeffreys treats mobilise and activate as one block; in this course they are separate, because they need different drills and are neglected to different degrees.

Jeffreys developed the model for team sport, not for track and field. So it is not a sprint concept carried across — it was designed for exactly your situation.

What goes wrong

The three most common mistakes

Too shortUnder fifteen minutes is not a warm-up for maximal sprints, it is a warm-up for easy running.
Too longMore than three times ten minutes of jogging costs energy you will miss in the main part. Longer is not better.
Wrong orderStretching at the start, build-up runs somewhere in between — the blocks lose their effect.

A warm-up is not a ritual you get through before training begins. It is the part of training that decides how good the rest will be.

This chapter

What comes in the next lessons

Lessons 2 to 5 cover the four blocks individually, with the drills that belong in each.
Lesson 6 settles the stretching question, which gets a different answer in every changing room.
Lesson 7 assembles everything into a twenty-two minute sequence.
Lesson 8 shows what you change on match days, test days and in the cold.
Learn the sequence from lesson 7 by heart. A warm-up where you have to think about what comes next will sooner or later get cut short.

Sources

  1. Jeffreys I. (2007): Warm-up Revisited — the RAMP Method of Optimising Warm-ups. Professional Strength and Conditioning 6, 15–19.
  2. Bishop D. (2003): Warm Up I — Potential Mechanisms and the Effects of Passive Warm Up on Exercise Performance. Sports Medicine 33(6), 439–454.
  3. Soligard T. et al. (2008): Comprehensive Warm-up Programme to Prevent Injuries in Young Female Footballers. BMJ 337, a2469.
  4. Ekstrand J. et al. (2011): Epidemiology of Muscle Injuries in Professional Football. American Journal of Sports Medicine 39(6), 1226–1232.