The 10-Minute Warm-Up Linked to Fewer Injuries

Ask a room full of youth and high school basketball coaches whether a warm-up can lower injury risk, and almost everyone raises a hand. In a survey of 50 coaches in Calgary, 94% agreed that basketball injuries are preventable, and 92% agreed that neuromuscular-training warm-ups specifically reduce that risk, according to research published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (2021).

Ask how many of those same coaches were running a warm-up that actually included all four evidence-based pieces, and the number drops to 18%.

Coaches clearly believe in this idea. Most just don't have the specific routine that matches it yet, so a general warm-up fills the slot instead. Below is the research behind that 18%, and a version of the routine you can run before your next practice.

What the Research Found

The routine behind these numbers comes from the SHRed Injuries Basketball program, developed and tested by researchers at the University of Calgary and detailed in the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy (2022). The baseline season included 63 teams (502 players), and the program season included 31 teams (307 players), from Alberta High School Athletics and the Calgary Minor Basketball Association. Players were roughly ages 11 to 18.

Season one (2016-17) served as a baseline year, with teams running their usual warm-ups. Season two (2017-18) introduced the program, splitting teams into a supervised group (17 teams, with weekly visits from research staff) and an unsupervised group (14 teams, led by coaches who had been trained on the program but ran it without researchers on hand).

This is a quasi-experimental design. It doesn't carry the same weight as a same-season randomized controlled trial, and the researchers describe it accordingly.

Teams running the program had a 36% lower rate of combined ankle and knee injuries than in the baseline season, according to the JOSPT study. Supervised and unsupervised teams landed close together, at 36% and 38% lower. Trained coaches running the program without researchers in the gym got results in the same range as teams with weekly research-staff support.

A Warm-Up and a Neuromuscular-Training Warm-Up Are Different Things

Any warm-up can feel like it counts — a few laps, some dynamic stretches, a layup line. But "warm-up" covers a lot of very different routines.

A 2025 commentary in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport asks directly whether the warm-up really reduces injury risk, and argues the field still needs better methods to answer that question with confidence. The basketball evidence in this article comes from one specific, structured neuromuscular program, tested over a full season against a baseline year. Those results don't automatically carry over to a general warm-up.

If your current warm-up leans mostly on jogging and stretching, that's a reasonable starting point. Building toward the four-part structure below is one way to grow it from there.

The 10-Minute Routine, Broken Down

The SHRed program runs about 10 minutes, uses 13 exercises with two difficulty levels, and covers four components: aerobic, agility, strength, and balance. In the study, teams ran it at least three times a week; the University of Calgary's SHRed Injuries Basketball program page recommends doing it before all practices and games.

A general sense of what each category covers:

• Aerobic — light jogging or continuous movement that raises heart rate and body temperature before anything higher-intensity.
• Agility — change-of-direction and deceleration work, since ankle and knee injuries commonly happen during cutting, stopping short, and changing speed.
• Strength — bodyweight squat and lunge patterns that build control around the hip and knee.
• Balance — single-leg stability work, targeting the landing and cutting moments where a lot of these injuries occur.

For the exact exercise cards and difficulty progressions, the SHRed program page above is the source to build from directly. The study population was roughly ages 11 to 18, so you'll want to scale the complexity down if you're working with younger or newer players. If you're running short practices or working with a larger roster, you may need to adapt the format to fit your gym rather than copy it exactly.

The Component Coaches Skip Most

Balance work was the least-used of the four components in the Calgary survey — only 26.8% of responding coaches included it.

Time is part of the picture. About half the coaches (48%) ran warm-ups of 10 minutes or less, and the researchers pointed out that many neuromuscular warm-ups take about 20 minutes once players know the exercises. Their conclusion: a basketball-specific program that fits in under 10 minutes is the way to go. That's exactly the slot a 10-minute routine like SHRed is built for — it doesn't ask you for more gym time than many coaches already spend.

Balance and single-leg stability work targets the landing and cutting moments tied to ankle and knee injuries. If you're short on time, our suggestion is to trim volume from the other three categories before cutting balance work — it's doing some of the most targeted work in the routine.