Warm-up essential in beating collisions

THE warm-up is a crucial component for all sports, especially if your sport involves repeat speed efforts, change of direction, acceleration and decelerations, and blunt force trauma from body contact (collision sport athletes), now the importance of the warmup becomes paramount.

Consider this, for a collision sport athlete (rugby league/ rugby union/American football), it is inevitable that at some point during a game their body will end up in what I call a “position of vulnerability”, that is to say, a high-risk position where your stability and mobility are extremely compromised (a potential injury position).

With this in mind, we need to start viewing the warm-up as a means of preparing the body to cope with game-related demands.

As a general rule, there are five key components that I always include in the warm-up or as I prefer to call it “movement preparation” for collision sport athletes. These include: 1) Isolated activation exercise to turn the muscles on (especially around the shoulders, pelvis and hips).

2) Integrated balance and postural stability exercise to promote postural control – athletes progress through a variety of postures that take them from stable to less stable body positions.

3) Dynamic mobility and running patterns – progressing from dynamic mobility to hop/ jump landings and then running patterns that introduce faster controlled movements.

4) Full noise game-related activities – this requires acceleration and decelerations, change of direction and reactive agility components simulating game-based speeds.

5) Body contact – finish with body contact activities as a precursor to match play.

Next time your Northern Pride boys run on to the field, you will have had a little insight to how we target movement preparation for gamebased performance demands and injury risk management.