Bare Minimum Culture: When the Warm-Up Becomes the Entire Training Plan

We are living in a culture that too often asks, “What is the least we can do?” Athlete development deserves a better question: “What does this athlete actually need?”

Soccer’s FIFA 11+ and Rugby’s Activate offer accessible approaches to physical preparation and injury risk reduction. The problem arises when coaches, clubs and parents treat these routines as the athlete’s entire strength and conditioning program.

Completing a warm-up does not establish that an athlete is receiving sufficient strength training.

The central issue is progressive overload. To continue developing strength, training must provide a sufficient challenge relative to the athlete’s current capacity, with demands adjusted as that capacity improves. Repeating an exercise that has become easy does not automatically keep making someone stronger. And after analysis of the exercises/drills in these program, they likely fall below the threshold of stress that ligaments require to improve their strength (more work needs to be done on the morphological changes in ligaments)

To be accurate, both programs contain exercise progressions. Activate explicitly increases difficulty or repetitions across levels. The question is whether those progressions continue to provide enough stimulus for the individual athlete. A progression on a worksheet is not proof of adequate overload. And more reps does not equate to what is needed to incur a strength adaptation. All S&C coaches know this.

Sophia Nimphius and Daniel Kadlec make a closely related argument in their principles-based critique of warm-up programs for ACL injury prevention. They question the continued use of warm-up protocols as substitutes for training that supports long-term physical development.

An exercise can belong in a warm-up and still develop strength when the dose and difficulty are sufficient. But its presence in a routine tells us little about whether an experienced athlete is being challenged enough. And when the game speed goes up, the physical capacity of the athlete must go up too!

My concern is the false reassurance that comes from ticking a box: “We did the injury prevention program, so strength training is covered.”

Where is the assessment? How is resistance being adjusted? What happens when the athlete outgrows the prescribed exercises? Where is the evidence that their capacity is improving?

The solution? Invest in structured, appropriately challenging strength training.

Athletes deserve a training plan that grows with them. Bare minimum preparation should never become the ceiling for their development.