I had an athlete reach out to me yesterday because he was writing a paper on the importance of a warm-up for reaction time. I thought since these articles are all about sports performance training and how to be a better athlete and individual overall I should cover an article on this. In this article, I’m just gonna give a very simple overview of how this correlates and how warm-up can and will affect your overall reaction. Before I begin I wanna stress the importance of a physical warm-up for every athlete before games and exercise. As an athlete if you’re on the field and you’re able to practice then you’re able to accelerate your career but if you’re injured not able to play or practice there is no acceleration in your career. Proper warm-up and activation can be the determiner of whether you’re injured or not so when you think of your goals anything of where you want to be ask yourself are these 10 to 15-minute warm-ups affect me negatively enough then I’m willing to risk injury for it. Well, most people do you warm up before sports performance training or even games as a dreadful I need to do this it could be one of the most important things you do before sports performance training or a game. Now that we’ve briefly gone over the importance of a warm-up Now let’s go over the importance of reaction is one of the most important athletic traits you can master for a whole handful of sports anything that doesn’t just rely on you and your physical body where there’s an opponent a ball or anything of that nature you rely heavily on reaction. So much so that people begin to mistake agility for a reaction when you think of agility you are reacting to opposite stimuli whether it’s an opponent whether it’s a ball whatever it may be you’re reacting on a second by second basis millisecond by millisecond basis to produce the outcome you wish to achieve. Increasing your overall reaction can increase whether you win or lose by how much you win by how much you lose whether you take your game to the next level or whether you’re stagnant and stay where you are. Now, how they relate. Without going into too much detail or blocking you down with too much detailed explanation I’ll give you the simple reasons of why they work and how they work hand-in-hand. In a very simple view, this is how your body functions your central nervous system your brain in your spine communicate with your peripheral nervous system everything besides your brain and respond your brain and your spine send sensors to the peripheral nervous system to communicate what it is that you’re doing so your brain, in other words, sends a sensor to your arm saying to move it. This being a very basic and simple definition paint a clear picture of how the body works. This communication happens to neural pathways by performing a proper warm-up you begin the communication and open the neural pathways making all future communication easier and more efficient. So by going into a situation without opening those neural pathways prepping those neural pathways in activating those neural pathways your reaction will be significantly slower than if you’re warm and those pathways are open and accessible. When it comes or sports performance training we are sure to incorporate a proper warm-up to be sure activation and total body readiness is achieved. By doing this it allows us while Training to be as prepped and ready as possible to achieve our ideal outcome. Whether it’s for a game for practice or for sports performance training properly warming up can and will improve overall performance. As we’ve talked about in other articles being at your best and doing everything in your power to be sure you perform at the highest level is vastly important when it comes to games practice or sports performance training itself be sure that you’re taking the steps needed to achieve your best outcome.