Warm-Up Science Mapped: Nearly 1,000 Studies Reveal Where the Evidence Ends

Every athlete on the planet does it, from schoolchildren chasing a football to Olympic sprinters in the call room. Yet a sweeping new analysis of more than nine hundred studies suggests that the science behind the humble warm-up is far thinner where it matters most than its universal popularity would imply. A team led by João Bruno of the University of Coimbra and Hugo Sarmento has published the first comprehensive scoping review with an Evidence Gap Map of warm-up research in athletes, covering 964 studies published between 1972 and 2026 in the journal Sports Medicine – Open. Their conclusion is striking: the field is vast but structurally lopsided, dominated by short-term laboratory proxies while the outcomes that coaches and athletes actually care about—injury prevention and competitive performance—remain largely untested.

The scale of the undertaking alone makes the review a landmark. The researchers searched PubMed, Scopus, SPORTDiscus and the Web of Science Core Collection for records published up to 20 January 2026, retrieving 27,644 hits. After removing 14,154 duplicates and screening 13,490 unique citations, they assessed 1,463 full-text reports and finally included 964 studies. Each was charted against a standardized framework capturing sport, athlete level, warm-up modality, dose variables and outcome domain, and the results were organized into an Evidence Gap Map—a visual grid showing where evidence is dense and where it is virtually empty. Crucially, the authors stress that the map reflects evidence availability, not evidence quality: no formal risk-of-bias appraisal was performed, and a crowded cell in the map does not mean a well-answered question.

What the map reveals first is a field obsessed with the jump test. Roughly 429 of the included studies measured jump performance—countermovement jumps, squat jumps, drop jumps and their derivatives—while about 251 assessed sprint speed, 124 measured agility or change of direction, and 187 examined strength or power. These proxy outcomes are easy to standardize, repeat and quantify, which explains their popularity. But the authors warn that a statistically meaningful improvement in an isolated jump or sprint does not necessarily translate into better match results, where technical execution, tactical decisions, opponent behaviour, pacing and fatigue all interact. Explicit competition-referent outcomes—results tied to actual matches, races or official events—appeared in only a handful of studies, a gap the reviewers describe as one of the most important limitations of the entire literature.

The intervention landscape itself is remarkably diverse. PAP/PAPE-oriented conditioning activities—heavy preloads, plyometrics, isometric holds and flywheel exercises designed to trigger post-activation potentiation or performance enhancement—accounted for the largest share, with 341 studies or 35.4 percent of the dataset. Stretching-based warm-ups, spanning static, dynamic, mixed and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation approaches, followed with 272 studies. Dynamic movement preparation and activation drills appeared in 206 studies, sport-specific warm-ups in 91, and smaller clusters covered passive heating, respiratory-muscle priming, vibration and neuromuscular stimulation, and soft-tissue techniques such as foam rolling. Notably, the widely promoted RAMP framework—Raise, Activate, Mobilise, Potentiate—was explicitly identifiable in just seven studies, roughly 0.8 percent of the evidence base, despite its prominence in coaching education.

Underneath this diversity lies a reporting problem that undermines the field’s usefulness. Total warm-up duration was missing or insufficiently specified in 384 records—nearly 40 percent of the dataset—and no usable intensity information could be extracted from 232 records, or 24 percent. Where intensity was reported, it ranged from vague descriptors like light or progressively increasing to quantitative anchors such as heart rate, percentage of one-repetition maximum, velocity or perceived exertion. The consequence, the authors argue, is that two protocols labelled identically—say, dynamic warm-up—may differ enormously in exercise selection, volume, sequencing, recovery structure and the transition interval before performance. Without consistent dose reporting, researchers cannot establish minimum effective doses or dose–response relationships, and coaches cannot reproduce the protocols that studies claim to support.

Geography and sport coverage are equally skewed. The 964 studies came from 58 countries, but the United States (121 studies), Turkey (103), the United Kingdom (84), Spain (76) and Brazil (63) dominated the output. Soccer was the most-studied sport with 176 studies, followed by track and field with 116, mixed-sport samples with 84, volleyball with 65, basketball with 56, swimming with 53 and rugby with 44. Dozens of other disciplines—combat sports, precision sports, winter and water-based sports—appeared in fewer than ten studies each, leaving their athletes to extrapolate from evidence generated in very different sporting contexts. The reviewers caution against generalizing findings from soccer players to athletes whose technical, physiological and competition demands differ substantially.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns injury prevention, the rationale most often cited for warming up in the first place. Only 34 studies—about 3.5 percent of the dataset—contained any direct injury-related endpoint, symptom measure or perceived protection outcome. The rest relied on proxies such as balance, flexibility, landing mechanics or joint-position sense, which the authors insist should not be treated as equivalent to demonstrated reductions in injury incidence or burden. Importantly, they emphasize that this scarcity reflects a surveillance and reporting gap rather than evidence that warm-up programmes fail to prevent injuries. Proper injury-outcome research demands large samples, prolonged follow-up, exposure-adjusted surveillance, standardized injury definitions and reliable monitoring of adherence—requirements that few studies have met.

The review also untangles a conceptual confusion that has muddied the field for decades. Acute performance-oriented warm-ups are designed to enhance immediate readiness through raised muscle temperature, improved oxygen kinetics, reduced stiffness and neuromuscular potentiation. Structured injury-prevention programmes, by contrast—such as the FIFA 11+ in football or neuromuscular training programmes in basketball and netball—work through repeated exposure, cumulative neuromuscular adaptation and implementation fidelity over an entire season. Both may be delivered before training, but their mechanisms and time courses are fundamentally different. Lumping them together under the single label of warm-up, the authors argue, leads to inappropriate attribution of long-term preventive effects to a single acute session, and vice versa.

A further blind spot is the individual athlete. The reviewers found 917 distinct labels used to describe competitive level across the included studies, from recreational and collegiate to elite, professional and international, with no standardization. Approximately 71 to 76 records did not clearly report competitive level at all. This matters because the balance between potentiation and fatigue after a warm-up depends on training status, strength, age, maturation and sex—variables that were inconsistently defined across the literature. The authors recommend adopting frameworks such as McKay’s Participant Classification Framework and, for youth athletes, reporting maturation status, so that warm-up responses can be compared meaningfully across populations.

Where does the field go from here? The Evidence Gap Map points clearly to the priorities: direct, exposure-adjusted injury endpoints; competition-referent outcomes that test whether laboratory gains survive contact with real matches; implementation research on feasibility, adherence and real-world deployment; and better coverage of underrepresented sports, female athletes and youth populations. The authors also call for minimum reporting standards specifying the complete order of warm-up components, their durations, intensity anchors, volumes, recovery intervals and the transition time before performance. Until then, the message for athletes and coaches is nuanced rather than dismissive: the acute performance benefits of a well-designed warm-up are reasonably well supported, but the deeper claims—about staying injury-free and winning on game day—still rest on a surprisingly narrow and unevenly mapped foundation of evidence.

Subject of Research: Mapping the distribution and gaps of warm-up research evidence in athletes across sports, intervention types and outcome domains

Article Title: Mapping Research on Warm-Up in Athletes: A Scoping Review with Evidence Gap Map

Article References: Bruno, J., Abade, E., Montoro-Bombú, R., Thapa, R. K., & Sarmento, H. (2026). Mapping Research on Warm-Up in Athletes: A Scoping Review with Evidence Gap Map. Sports Medicine – Open, 12(1), Article 154. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-026-01123-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40798-026-01123-9

Keywords: warm-up, athletes, scoping review, evidence gap map, injury prevention, post-activation potentiation, sports performance, neuromuscular, PRISMA, sport science, stretching, RAMP framework