Fradkin, A. J., & Smoglia, J. M.(2010). Which warm-up components are essential for performance improvement? Presentation 615 at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland; June 2-5.

This study examined the effects of different warm-up components, both individually and in conjunction with each other, on vertical jump performance. Untrained Ss (M = 16; F = 18) performed a vertical jump as a baseline and after seven warm-up combinations: 1) aerobic exercise; 2) stretching; 3) specific activity; 4) aerobic exercise and stretching; 5) aerobic exercise and specific activity; 6) stretching and specific activity; and 7) all components, in random order on non-consecutive days. Analyses were performed on male, female, and gender-combined groups.

The aerobic exercise showed a significant increase in vertical jump for males, females, and THE combined groups, while the stretch and specific component showed a significant decrease in vertical jump for all three participant groups. The aerobic and stretch condition showed an increase for combined and male participants. The aerobic and specific component and all-component treatments were only significant for the combined category.

Implication. Aerobic exercise was the most valuable activity to improve two-phase explosive performance in untrained subjects. Coupling this with stretching increased performance more in males but not females. [This may be because the females were quite untrained and performing multiple exercises may have caused fatigue.] Specific exercise caused a unanimous performance decrease, possibly due to exercises being too intense. Stretching had little impact on performance, but unlike other studies, there was no significant performance decrement. [Note: It would be wrong to generalize these findings to highly trained athletes.]

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