Warming up properly before a Saturday game

What most junior warm ups look like

Turn up to a Victorian stadium on a Saturday morning and you'll see the same thing on most courts. A handful of kids arrive with four minutes on the clock, grab a ball, and shoot long shots from well outside their range until the buzzer goes. One or two sit on the floor pulling at a hamstring because somebody once told them to. Then the game starts.

It matters more than it looks. The first two or three minutes of a junior game are where the sloppiest basketball happens, and a good chunk of that's simply bodies that were not ready. Cold legs don't change direction well, cold shoulders don't shoot well, and a child who spends the first quarter catching up is often the one who gets subbed off early and never gets going.

It's also the cheapest improvement available to a family. No coaching required, no extra sessions, no cost. Just arriving earlier and using the time properly.

Static stretching is the wrong tool for before

The habit of sitting down and holding stretches before sport is decades old, and most of the coaching I've been taught in the last ten years has moved away from it. Holding a muscle still does little to raise body temperature or get a body ready to sprint, which is what a warm up is actually for. Save it for afterwards or for a separate flexibility session if your child needs one.

What you want instead is movement through range. Leg swings, walking lunges, high knees, heel flicks, arm circles, side to side skips. The joints go through the positions the game will ask for, while the heart rate comes up. It takes four or five minutes and it does the job static stretching was wrongly given credit for.

The three parts that matter

Part one is raising the temperature. Two minutes of easy jogging up and down the court, then some skipping and side steps. The aim is simply to be slightly warm and slightly puffed. If they're not breathing a bit harder, it hasn't worked.

Part two is movement. Five minutes of the leg swings, lunges and skips above, plus defensive slides across the key both ways. This is where you get the ankles, hips and shoulders ready for the positions a game puts them in.

Part three is basketball. Layups on both sides, a few close range shots, some passing at speed, then shots from the spots they actually shoot from in games. Finish with two or three efforts at full pace, because the first sprint of the game should not be the first sprint of the day.

Warm up shooting is not shooting practice

A warm up isn't the time to fix a shot, and it's definitely not the time to take long shots from places they'll never shoot from in a game. All that does is stretch the mechanics out of shape right before tip off and hand them three misses to think about while they wait for the whistle.

Start close, under the ring, and work out to their normal range. Make several in a row from each distance before moving out. The point is to leave the warm up with the feeling of the ball going in, because the first shot of the game carries whatever the last shot of the warm up felt like.

When the stadium only gives you five minutes

Plenty of junior competitions run back to back games with almost no gap, so the official warm up time is tiny. The answer is to do the first two parts outside the court, in the corridor or the car park, before you're allowed on. Jogging, swings, lunges and slides need no ring and no court.

Then the five minutes on court is all basketball, which is the only part that genuinely needs the floor. A child who walks on already warm gets far more out of those five minutes than one who is starting cold, and it's usually the difference between playing from the first minute and playing from the second quarter.

The part of the warm up nobody talks about

A routine before a game does something beyond the physical, and with junior kids it might be the more useful half. It gives them a predictable set of things to do in the twenty minutes where nerves have nothing else to occupy them. Same order, same drills, same finish. It works on the same principle as a free throw routine.

It also means the child walks onto the court having already done ten things successfully that morning. That's a much better state to start in than standing on the sideline watching the other team and working out who is bigger than them.