When I’m watching any professional team sport that uses substitutions, I’m always struck by how stationary all of the players on the sidelines are before they come (back) into the game. In hockey and basketball, players are just sitting on the bench. In the NFL (the sport with a ton of muscle, tendon, and ligament injuries), players are just standing around on the sidelines waiting to rush back into the game, ready to exert themselves to the maximum…. but are they really ready? (time to pick on the NFL)
In every endurance sport that I’ve participated in, the mantra has always been “the shorter and more intense the effort, the longer the warmup,” and “you have to keep moving between interval efforts.” In football, exertion in the game consists almost exclusively of very short, intense sprints and efforts. Of course, players go through a very rigorous warm up before game time, but when they are standing or sitting on the sidelines for 15+ minutes at a time, how can they possibly expect to have their muscles stay warm, perform well, and perform safely for an entire game? Isn’t it even worse when you’re playing outdoors in the snow and/or the cold?
If the answer the above questions are “they can’t expect to stay warm,” and “yes, it would be worse,” then it wouldn’t surprise me if teams across all professional sports begin to implement more structured and regimented warm-up exercise on the sidelines in between shifts, drives, and subs. Actually implementing methods of keeping players warm during their breaks in a game might be tricky, particularly for hockey and basketball, but football might be easy. NFL sidelines are definitely large enough to accommodate stationary bikes, speed ladders, and ample space to jog and stretch. Making changes in the NHL and NBA might require modifications to arena space, which would not be ideal, but maybe this is a great problem for a new product. (If I can create something new that reduces the chance my home team’s superstar point guard will be injured by 0.5% (whom we pay $15M a year, by the way), I will have an easy time selling the product.)
Of course, there are many arguments to be made that any prolonged warm-up activities could modify the finely-tuned balance of slow-twitch and fast-twitch musculature in professional athletes, which is possible, but likely avoidable with the right exercises. Prolonged and new exercises for athletes might lead to new types of injury in a given sport as well. One could also argue that if having players do active warmups on the sideline was a good idea, someone would have done it already— an argument I typically don’t enjoy.
Despite some potential counter-arguments, I truly believe that within the next ten years, we will see a pretty dramatic shift towards more active sideline activities in team sports, particularly in the NFL. And selfishly, I would still love to see defensive lineman on normal-person-sized stationary bikes during every offensive drive.
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