Cognitive Warm-Ups May Fine-Tune Landing Control in Team-Sport Athletes

Every jump in a fast-paced team sport is a gamble with the body’s own engineering. When a basketball player leaps for a rebound or a volleyball hitter rises for a spike, the landing that follows is often decided in mid-air, after an opponent’s movement or a deflected ball has changed the picture entirely. A new randomized crossover trial published in PLOS One by Felix Laukhardt of Goethe University Frankfurt and colleagues examines whether the warm-up routine performed minutes before such moments can sharpen the way athletes absorb those chaotic landings. The study compared a widely used injury-prevention warm-up with two versions enriched with cognitive demands, and although the headline statistical results were cautious, the work offers a revealing look at how the brain and the knee collaborate, or fail to, during one of sport’s most dangerous fractions of a second.

The stakes are far from abstract. Anterior cruciate ligament ruptures, ankle sprains, and a host of other lower-limb injuries frequently occur during landing and cutting maneuvers, and they occur disproportionately when the athlete is reacting to an unpredictable situation rather than executing a rehearsed one. Decades of research have shown that neuromuscular warm-up programs can reduce injury rates when performed consistently over months. What has remained murky is whether a single session of such a warm-up has any immediate, acute effect on movement quality, and whether embedding cognitive challenges into that warm-up, forcing athletes to perceive, decide, and react while moving, could amplify the benefit. The new study was designed to probe exactly that question with laboratory-grade measurement tools.

Eighteen team-sport athletes, five of them women, with an average age of twenty-three years, completed three different warm-up routines on separate days in a randomized three-arm crossover design. The reference intervention was the Prevent Injury and Enhance Performance program, known as PEP, a structured neuromuscular warm-up with an established evidence base in injury prevention. The two experimental variants layered cognitive load onto the same physical framework. The first, called PEP+, added exercises targeting visuomotor processing and executive functions, the mental machinery that governs attention, inhibition, and rapid decision-making. The second, PEP-SKILLCOURT, incorporated reactive agility drills using an interactive training device that lights up targets athletes must respond to, blending perception, choice, and whole-body movement under time pressure.

After each warm-up, the athletes performed jump-landing tasks on a capacitive pressure plate that recorded the forces and pressure distribution beneath their feet with high temporal resolution. Crucially, the researchers distinguished between two landing conditions. In the pre-planned condition, athletes knew in advance which foot would take the brunt of the landing. In the unplanned condition, the landing side was cued only after take-off, mimicking the real-world scenario in which a defender’s position or a teammate’s challenge forces a last-millisecond adjustment. Six trials examined the pre-planned version and sixteen the unplanned one, giving the unplanned task, the one that matters most for injury, the larger share of the statistical spotlight.

The measurement battery read like a biomechanist’s wishlist. Peak vertical ground reaction force, the single largest spike of force shooting up through the leg at touchdown, has long been scrutinized as a potential marker of injurious landing loads. Time to that peak reveals how abruptly the force arrives, since steeper loading rates are thought to stress ligaments and cartilage. Center of pressure path length traced how much the athlete wobbled, capturing postural control as the body fought to hold its balance. Time to stabilization quantified how quickly the athlete settled into a steady stance, while standing errors and decision errors recorded outright failures of control and cognition, such as landing on the wrong foot or losing balance entirely.

The analysis employed linear and generalized mixed models, a statistical framework well suited to repeated-measures designs in which each athlete serves as their own control, and the models adjusted for flight time to account for differences in jump execution. The first reassuring finding was methodological: no significant carryover effects emerged, meaning that the order in which athletes experienced the three warm-ups did not contaminate the comparisons. The dominant signal in the data, however, belonged not to the warm-ups but to the landing condition itself. Whether a landing was planned or sprung on the athlete in mid-air significantly altered peak vertical ground reaction force and center of pressure dynamics, with differences ranging from minus four to plus seventeen percent, and it significantly changed error rates as well.

Post hoc tests sharpened that picture. During unplanned landings, athletes exhibited lower peak vertical ground reaction forces yet greater fluctuations in their center of pressure, alongside significantly more errors of both the standing and decision variety. At first glance, lower landing forces might sound like good news, but the accompanying instability and error counts tell a different story: athletes were softer on touchdown precisely because they were less organized, absorbing the landing with a less controlled strategy rather than a more protective one. The findings align with a growing body of evidence that cognitive uncertainty degrades motor performance, and they suggest that the unplanned landing task successfully recreated the perceptual-motor chaos that precedes many real-world injuries.

What about the cognitive warm-ups themselves? Here the trial’s verdict was deliberately restrained. After Holm adjustment, the standard procedure for controlling false positives across multiple comparisons, no significant treatment effects or treatment-by-condition interactions survived. In plain terms, the study could not confirm that any of the three warm-ups acutely changed landing biomechanics or error rates. Yet the exploratory trends were intriguing enough to flag. Athletes who had completed the PEP+ version, with its emphasis on visuomotor processing and executive functions, tended to show lower landing loads and reduced center of pressure fluctuations, a combination that would, if it held up, indicate gentler and more stable landings. The authors are explicit that these are trends, not conclusions, and that larger trials are needed before anyone rewrites a warm-up protocol on their basis.

That caution is scientifically appropriate, but it should not obscure the study’s broader significance. The experiment demonstrates a rigorous template for asking acute-effect questions that the injury-prevention field has largely skipped, leaping from long-term program adherence straight to assumed mechanisms without checking what a single session actually does to movement quality. It also validates the unplanned jump-landing paradigm as a sensitive probe: the planned-versus-unplanned contrast produced robust, statistically significant differences across force, balance, and error outcomes, confirming that cognitive uncertainty is not a cosmetic variable but a primary driver of landing behavior. For coaches, the message is that the mental dimension of landing is measurable and meaningful, and that warm-ups which train the eyes and the decision-making circuitry alongside the muscles deserve serious investigation rather than dismissal as gimmicks.

The road ahead, as the authors note, runs through larger samples and richer biomechanics. Landing loads at the knee involve joint-specific kinematics, moments, and muscle activation patterns that a pressure plate cannot fully resolve, and future work should examine whether motor-cognitive warm-ups shift the hip and knee strategies most implicated in ligament injury. Whether the promising PEP+ trends crystallize into reliable effects will depend on trials with the statistical power this eighteen-athlete study could not muster. But the conceptual payoff is already clear: the warm-up is not merely a physical rehearsal but a cognitive one, and the seconds before a jump may shape the milliseconds of the landing that follows. In a field where a single mistimed touchdown can end a season, that insight is worth every wobble recorded on the pressure plate.

Subject of Research: Acute effects of motor-cognitive injury-prevention warm-ups on unplanned jump-landing biomechanics in team-sport athletes

Article Title: Acute effects of motor-cognitive injury-prevention warm-ups on unplanned jump-landing performance in team-sport athletes: A randomized crossover trial

Article References: Laukhardt, F., Vogt, L., Hülsdünker, T., Engeroff, T., Banzer, W., Groneberg, D., & Giesche, F. (2026). Acute effects of motor-cognitive injury-prevention warm-ups on unplanned jump-landing performance in team-sport athletes: A randomized crossover trial. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360379. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360379

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360379

Keywords: injury prevention, warm-up, team sports, landing biomechanics, motor-cognitive training, executive functions, reactive agility, ground reaction force, randomized crossover trial, ACL injury, neuromuscular control, PLOS One