Published September 25, 2026 06:59AM
What You Need to Know
A consensus published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance features a list of 72 statements about athletic warm-ups that were debated, negotiated, and ultimately approved by an international panel of 23 sports scientists and high-level coaches from 12 countries.
In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther nailed his controversial Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Germany. “Here I stand,” he later proclaimed. “I can do no other.”
It’s in this spirit, I gather, that a group of 23 sports scientists from around the world recently issued a list of 72 statements about the nature, purpose, and benefits of the athletic warm-up. These 72 theses were finalized after a lengthy process of debate, negotiation, and revision, such that each one was approved by at least 19 of the 23 experts. Collectively, they lay out the current state of knowledge—or at least of expert consensus—about what we’re supposed to do before training or competing.
The list appears in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, led by Spanish physiologist Daniel Boullosa along with scientific colleagues from 11 other countries, many of whom also have experience competing or coaching at the highest levels of sport. Here’s where they stand on some of the key questions about warming up.
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What Is a Warm-Up?
One of the very few unanimous statements on the list provides a definition of the warm-up: “A protocol used by athletes before training sessions and competitions to prepare themselves for subsequent activities.”
On the surface, this seems straightforward. You warm up so that you’ll perform better in whatever task follows, and perhaps also minimize the risk that you’ll get injured while doing it.
But there are some additional nuances. Perhaps some components of your warm-up are intended not only to provide immediate gain, but also for their long-term benefits: learning new skills, improving form, developing strength, increasing range of motion. If you’re doing, say, plyometric drills before a workout, the line between “warming up” and “training” is blurry. You can even use the warm-up as a sort of screening tool to judge whether you’re ready to do a hard workout or need some rest.
As a result, a theme that recurs frequently in the 72 statements is that context matters. A warm-up before a workout may include lots of elements with long-term payoff; a warm-up before a race is all about maximizing speed.
How Does a Warm-Up Boost Performance?
The primary performance-related goals of a warm-up are threefold: to increase body temperature, stimulate metabolism, and enhance readiness.
Warming the body is a central goal, as the name suggests. Warmer muscles are more supple and flexible; increased temperature also speeds up the transmission of neural signals and accelerates metabolic reactions, so that you can supply more energy to your muscles right from the start of your workout.
But there’s more to warming up than just getting warm. In fact, a study back in 2011 tested the performance-boosting potential of 20 minutes of easy cycling compared to 20 minutes of sitting in a warm bath. The warming was equivalent, but the bath didn’t cut it because the active warm-up had other effects, like ramping up heart rate and breathing so that the oxygen delivery system was prepared for the demands of exercise.
Enhancing “readiness” is another nebulous term. Ramping up your temperature and metabolism gets you physiologically ready. But if you ask an athlete whether they’re “ready” for the race that’s about to start, their answer will reflect at least in part their psychological state. I’ve written before about the (admittedly thin) research on mental warm-ups, including at least one study that tested a “placebo” warm-up: when athletes were told that the pre-competition routine they were doing would improve performance, it did.
Will Warming Up Reduce My Risk of Injury?
This one is funny. The experts did not agree that warming up can reduce your risk of injury during the workout or race that immediately follows, even though that’s the explanation most of us have internalized about why warm-ups are important.
What about chronic effects? Does regularly warming up reduce your overall risk of injury in the long run? In this case, the following statement just barely earned the 19 votes needed to approve it:
“It is possible to chronically reduce the risk of injuries when including preventive exercises (e.g. strength, balance, etc.) in the warm-up protocol.”
But a very similar statement earned unanimous approval:
“It is possible to chronically reduce the risk of injuries when including preventive exercises (e.g. strength, balance, etc.) in the warm-up protocol as well as in other parts of the training session.”
In other words, they think you should do strength and balance exercises, but it doesn’t matter whether you do them during your warm-up or at some other time.
What Are the Ingredients of a Warm-Up?
The three key components are a general phase, a specific phase, and conditioning activities.
The general phase is usually continuous, aerobic, and submaximal. It should be long and intense enough to raise your body temperature and kickstart your metabolism. For runners, that might mean a 10- to 15-minute jog.
The specific phase prepares you for the physical, technical, and tactical challenges of the upcoming activity, and will usually move your muscles through (and perhaps a little bit beyond) the expected range of motion. If you’re a soccer player, you’re doing some passing and dribbling drills; if you’re a runner, you’re doing dynamic exercises like high knees, leg swings, walking lunges, skips, and so on.
The conditioning phase gets even closer to the actual demands of the workout or competition. Strength and power athletes might do some near-maximal lifts or contractions to trigger an effect called post-activation potentiation, a temporary increase in nervous system activation. Endurance athletes might do a series of fast sprints, or some longer sustained hard efforts lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes.
The goal of these harder efforts is to improve oxygen kinetics, which is how quickly your body responds to the sudden demands of running hard by ramping up oxygen delivery to the muscles. These days, for example, I try to do two 30- to 60-second surges about 10 or 15 minutes before starting a race.
How Do You Time It Right?
This is a tricky one. The expert consensus panel says a “short” warm-up is less than five minutes and a “long” one, which is far more common among competitive athletes, lasts more than 20 minutes.
But there are all sorts of contextual factors. Well-trained athletes can benefit from the performance boost of a longer warm-up, but for novice athletes the extra fatigue may wipe out any benefits. This balance between priming the body and tiring yourself out is the fundamental tension in figuring out your warm-up.
For a marathon, where fuel stores are a limiting factor and the initial pace isn’t too arduous, a very short warm-up, like five minutes of jogging, is probably sufficient. On a hot day, too, you can get away with a shorter warm-up to achieve the same degree of body warming. In fact, too much warm-up risks overheating prematurely.
On a cold day, on the other hand, you might need a longer or more intense warm-up to raise your body temperature, and you might want to leave less time between the end of your warm-up and the start of your workout or race to avoid cooling down too much. Alternately, you can use passive heating to stay warm between warm-up and race. I remember British cyclists using battery-powered pants at one point; more prosaically, you can just put on sweats while you’re waiting.
What About Stretching, You Idiot?
I was just coming to that. When you’re seeking consensus among 23 diverse experts, you’re unlikely to get hot takes, but they mostly agreed on this: “In general, dynamic stretching exercises are preferred to static stretching exercises during warm-up protocols.” That is, yes to high knees and leg swings, no to sitting on the ground desperately trying to touch your toes.
There are, as usual, some nuances. If your sport requires flexibility—you’re a gymnast or hockey goaltender, say—then static stretching can be useful, whether you do it during your warm-up or at some other time.
Some research has found that prolonged static stretching reduces strength and hurts efficiency, which is probably the main reason that pre-run stretching has fallen out of favor. The consensus statement notes that this isn’t actually a big deal: you can reverse those effects by doing some dynamic exercises after the static stretching. So if you personally like static stretching, carry on—but there’s no evidence that suggests you need to include it, and a recent meta-analysis found no link between stretching and injury rates.
Thus spake the warm-up experts.
There are plenty of unanswered questions, and whenever I write about warm-up research I’m always surprised at how thin the evidence is that they actually do anything. But this is one of those cases where the accumulated wisdom of athlete experience is hard to ignore, and I think the ideas in the consensus document strike a nice balance between what the science says and what the athletes say. Warm-ups aren’t magical performance boosters, but for now they’re the best tool we have to get our bodies and minds ready to push.
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