The Art of the Warm-Up: Why Rituals Matter

We all have rituals.

We make coffee or tea in the morning. We may sit in the same chair while we drink it. Some of us take a walk before beginning work. Others make a list for the coming day. We have rituals around birthdays, holidays, weddings, funerals, and the beginning of a new year.

Athletes may be some of the most obvious practitioners of ritual.

Watch a baseball player before he steps into the batter's box. He adjusts his batting gloves, touches his helmet, takes a practice swing, steps in, steps out, and then settles himself before the pitch. Watch a basketball player at the free-throw line or a golfer preparing to hit a shot. The movements are familiar and repeated, sometimes almost exactly, over thousands of attempts.

We sometimes dismiss these behaviors as superstition. And sometimes they are. But I think there is something deeper going on.

Ritual helps us cross a threshold.

It allows us to move from whatever we were doing before into whatever we're about to do next.

And that brings me to something my coach Harry Marra taught me many years ago:

The art of the warm-up.

More Than Getting Warm

When we talk about warming up for exercise, we usually talk about physiology. Raise the body temperature. Increase blood flow. Mobilize the joints. Activate the appropriate muscles. Prepare the nervous system for greater speed and force.

All of that matters.

But after more than thirty years of coaching people—and after spending much of my earlier life as an athlete—I think the warm-up does something else.

It gives us time to arrive.

You can walk into a gym carrying the entire day with you. Traffic. Work. An argument. A deadline. A poor night's sleep. Something you're worried about. Something you're excited about.

Then you begin moving.

You breathe.

You start paying attention.

How do I feel today?

Where am I tight?

How am I moving?

What feels good?

What needs a little more time?

What have I got today?

Gradually, your attention shifts. You are no longer simply the person who walked through the door.

You're here.

You're ready to train.

That's a ritual.

And I am beginning to realize that I've been using versions of this ritual throughout my life—sometimes consciously and sometimes without understanding what I was doing.

Warming Up for Tomorrow

Lately, I've noticed that I prefer to prepare for my day the night before.

Before going to bed, I think about what I want to accomplish the following day. I get things organized. I put my intentions somewhere other than inside my head.

It calms me.

I don't lie in bed trying to remember what I had intended to do tomorrow. And I don't wake up too early with my mind already racing, trying to reconstruct some mental to-do list.

When I've prepared the night before, I tend to wake up clearer.

I know where I'm going.

It recently occurred to me that I've done something like this before.

1988

I used to journal much more than I do now.

I especially remember doing it during 1988, the year of the Olympic Trials.

That was my best year as a decathlete.

I had only the usual little niggling injuries. I competed well. My season didn't have as many dramatic ups and downs.

And I was calmer.

Not calm. I don't want to rewrite history.

Just calmer than my normal.

I would often write before going to sleep. And what strikes me now is that I wasn't only recording what I had done in training. I was also writing about how I felt. My thoughts. My desires. What was bothering me. What I wanted.

I was beginning to have a conversation with myself.

I can't say that journaling caused me to have my best season. There were obviously many reasons I competed well that year.

But I can look back now and recognize that something important was happening at the same time.

I was paying attention to myself.

And then I didn't make the Olympic team.

That hurt.

I decided 1988 would essentially be my last year of competing at that level of intensity. I continued to train and compete. I still had success. But it wasn't quite the same.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped journaling as much.

I continued to record my workouts. I wrote down what I did and how the training went.

But I wasn't writing nearly as much about how I was doing.

There's a difference.

I kept the training log. I stopped keeping the conversation with myself.

Looking back, I think I had begun to get to know my authentic self. I was starting to listen to an inner voice that had probably been there all along.

But then I didn't get what I wanted.

I didn't make the Olympic team.

And rather than continuing to explore what I had begun to discover, I pulled away from it.

It has taken me a long time to understand that I hadn't reached the end of something.

I'd barely begun.

Learning to Listen

As athletes, it's very easy to become focused on outcomes.

Did I win?

Did I make the team?

What was my time?

What did I score?

Did the coach approve?

Did people notice?

Those things mattered enormously to me as a young athlete.

But there is another kind of development happening underneath performance if we're willing to pay attention to it.

We're learning ourselves.

This is where Harry's idea about the art of the warm-up has taken on a much larger meaning for me.

A coach can give an athlete a warm-up. Do these exercises. Run this distance. Perform these drills. Do this many repetitions.

But eventually the athlete has to learn to warm himself up.

That requires something more sophisticated than following instructions.

It requires listening.

How does my body feel?

What do I need today?

Do I need more movement? More intensity? Less?

Am I anxious?

Am I distracted?

Am I ready?

A good warm-up gradually teaches an athlete to answer those questions for himself.

The warm-up becomes less about "What am I supposed to do?"

And more about:

"What am I experiencing?"

That's the beginning of inner authority.

Ritual or Superstition?

This may also explain why ritual is so prevalent in sport.

A baseball player may tap the plate three times before every at-bat. A basketball player may bounce the ball exactly the same number of times before every free throw. A golfer may go through an almost identical sequence before every shot.

Some of that can certainly become superstition.

"If I don't do this, something bad will happen."

But ritual can serve another purpose.

It reduces noise.

It narrows our attention.

It gives us something familiar when the situation around us may be unpredictable.

The ritual doesn't guarantee what happens next.

The baseball player may still strike out.

The golfer may still miss the putt.

I certainly discovered that journaling and preparing carefully didn't guarantee me a place on the Olympic team.

That's not what ritual does.

The purpose of a ritual isn't to control what happens next. It is to prepare yourself to meet what happens next.

The Warm-Ups of Everyday Life

Once I began thinking about warm-ups this way, I started seeing them everywhere.

Making tea in the morning can be a warm-up for the day.

Preparing tomorrow's work before going to sleep can be a warm-up.

Journaling can be a warm-up.

A Sunday evening ritual can prepare us for the coming week.

Even New Year's resolutions make more sense to me when viewed this way.

January 1 is an artificial boundary, of course. Physically, nothing magical happens when December 31 becomes January 1.

But psychologically, we recognize that we've crossed a threshold.

We stop.

We look backward.

We consider where we are.

And then we ask where we want to go.

That's a warm-up.

The problem isn't necessarily that New Year's resolutions are foolish. The problem is expecting the ritual itself to create the change.

It can't.

The ritual opens the door. Our habits have to carry us through it.

Preparing for Life

There's something else I've come to understand.

Life doesn't wait until we're ready.

Which is probably fair.

If life waited until I felt completely ready, I know I'd probably wait too.

Instead, the next thing comes.

The competition arrives. The opportunity appears. Something goes wrong. Someone needs us. We succeed. We fail. We lose something. We discover something new about ourselves.

And then life asks:

What are you going to do now?

Maybe that's why learning how to prepare matters so much.

Harry taught me the art of the warm-up because he wanted me to become a better decathlete.

At the time, that's what I thought it was about.

Run. Stretch. Drill. Prepare the body. Get ready to compete.

Almost forty years later, I think I understand his lesson differently.

The warm-up is where we slow down long enough to notice ourselves.

We assess where we are.

We listen.

We prepare.

And then—ready or not—we step into the arena.

The Art of the Warm-Up begins with learning how to prepare yourself for a sporting event.

It ends with learning how to prepare yourself for life.