It's More Than Just Warmth

Bruce Lee once said, “Honestly expressing yourself...now, it is very difficult to do. I mean it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with a cocky feeling and then feel pretty cool...or I can make all kinds of phony things, you know what I mean, blinded by it or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself and to express myself honestly, now that, my friend is very hard to do.”

Bruce Lee was a dexterous mover and a deep thinker. His thoughts are powerful and continuously shape our Form of Life here in the Starters Athletic Development department. 

All sessions begin with some form of a warm-up, and this is a wonderful opportunity for the athlete to have some ownership and honestly express oneself. The warm-up takes on a number of shapes and serves many purposes. We strongly feel it goes beyond just getting the body heated. To be frank, if that’s all it was about, then we should just stand in a sauna for 10 minutes before we start the training session. Let’s take a look at some of the more widely recognized reasons that an athlete needs to warm-up.

Benefits Include: 

• Creates an environment for the athlete to psychologically prepare for the training session

• Increases blood flow and temperature, which helps with the release of oxygen from hemoglobin

• Increases joint movement and health by secreting more synovial fluid

• Increases fascial elasticity

• Increases sweat production, which aids in cooling the body

The above doesn’t need to occur in a rigid, boring, and often linear fashion. In addition, the warm-up should respect the performer-environment relationship. Under an ecological dynamics framework, athletes are considered complex adaptive systems. In complex adaptive systems, the multitude of parts continually form coordinated patterns (synergies), which are shaped by surrounding informational constraints (Renshaw et al., 2019). 

So how else can the warm-up be used? We feel the time should be spent connecting to information in the environment and exploring movement. When designing the warm-up, we suggest that you include activities that promote exploration and potentially encourage the athlete’s behaviors to emerge in a similar way to the body of the practice or training session. Athletes need to open up their degrees of freedom (motor, perceptual, and cognitive) to potentially harness them when the training becomes more specific.

We place a premium on holistic movement, specifically in the warm-up, where the athlete can use their intentions and attention to guide their movement. Maintaining control of the body in space is a collective effort from the perceptual systems as the athlete connects to the information available to them at that time. No two movements ever occur in the same way, so we approach our warm-up through what Nikolai Bernstein called ‘repetition without repetition.’  Experiencing movement in different ways helps with adaptability.

Lastly, there is a need for excitement, creativity, and movement authenticity. It’s our job as coaches, or ‘environment architects’ to give the athlete a chance to gain ownership of their movement. The warm-up is a great place to start.

Here is one example. 

Tyler Yearby 

Director of Athlete Learning, Starters Sports Training

For more reading:

1. Approaching the Weight Room from an Ecological Dynamics Perspective. Emergence (2019)

2. Renshaw, I, Davids, K, Newcombe, D, and Roberts, W. The Constraints-Led Approach, 2019

The Thrill

Throughout the journey of playing sports, athletes often focus on the outcome instead of focusing on what inspired them to begin the journey in the first place. Winning a championship is incredible, but is it really more important than the joy, thrill, and flood of emotions that accompany us on the ride to winning that all-important game? 

Collectively, our approach is to guide these young athletes in their pursuit of greatness. A major part of achieving greatness is finding pleasure ‘in’ movement. So, where does this begin? Our point of departure is looking at physical literacy. Will Roberts, who is a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise at the University of Gloucestershire, nicely captured the holistic nature of physical literacy. “It’s more holistic than just the physical. It’s more about how people become confident, motivated, and have the knowledge to become more physically active.” Physical development is vitally important and must be considered, but social, emotional, cognitive, and perceptual qualities are equally important. 

We strive to create environments that allow for the interconnectedness of these qualities to flourish. In our experience, we’ve found that when athletes are challenged in numerous ways, they build a solid foundation for later in life. Life and sport are about interactions. Here are a couple of examples.

As coaches, we are a vital part of the learning journey. Generally, this is reduced to how we influence physical development. However, we are part of a larger 'system' in which the individual finds a 'fit' within the world around them. They are just as deeply social as they are related to abilities (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017). As coaches or guides, we are involved in a perpetual process! 

Here are a few reasons young athletes benefit from exposure to a holistic approach to training.

- Reduces the risk of strain, overuse, and likelihood of injury

- It reduces stress levels related to specific training & participation in competitions

- A sense of fun is added to the sessions, which helps with motivational levels

- The opportunity to communicate to collectively solve a task is designed in

- Appreciates the individual-environment relationship 

- Purpose, meaning, and intention beyond the movement itself (Lambert, K., 2020)

Finally, one of our main goals is that of health and well-being. If we let movement, which is deeply intertwined with the world around us, serve as the platform for growth, then our willingness to spend countless hours pursuing our dream seems easy.

Tyler Yearby, M.Ed., CSCS

Director of Athlete Learning, Starters Sports Training 

For more reading:

1. Lambert, K. (2020) Re-conceptualizing embodied pedagogies in physical education by creating pre-text vignettes to trigger pleasure ‘in’ movement, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 25:2, 154-173.

2. Rietveld, E. & Kiverstein, J. (2014) A Rich Landscape of Affordances, Ecological Psychology, 26:4, 325-352.

3. Van Dijk, L. & Rietveld, E. (2017) Foregrounding Sociomaterial Practice in Our Understanding of Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework. Frontiers Psychology.