Basketball Warm-Up Games

At the first practice of his first season as performance coach at RASTA Vechta, a pro team in Germany, Domenik Theodorou finished the warm-up by lining the players up on the baseline. Go to the other baseline, he told them, building speed as you go, about 80% by the end. By his own estimate they gave him about 50%. The second run was the same. "It was incredibly boring," he told George Vaz on EP155.

At the next practice he gave every player a ball and put six in each corner of the court. The task was to throw the ball up the court, let it bounce three times, and finish with a layup at the other end. After two tries it became two bounces, and after two more, one bounce. To beat the ball, the players had to accelerate, and they did, far better than the day before. They were picking on each other when someone failed and helping each other work out how to throw it.

The next day he asked each player, one at a time, why he'd set that task. Nobody mentioned speed. They thought it was about layups, or about how to throw the ball so they could finish after one bounce. That was Domenik's aim. The players built up their speed without thinking about it, because they were busy solving something else.

Domenik spent years refining what he thought was the perfect routine: every muscle group, every plane of movement, every dynamic stretch done with the technique he wanted. Eventually he had it all figured out, and the warm-up never changed.

Transcending Basketball lists "a belief in identical player development routines and pregame warm-ups" as one of the habits passed down through basketball culture, and Alex is direct about what they give you.

The book's alternative is tag and other games, and "repetition without repetition", Nikolai Bernstein's phrase for reaching the same goal with a slightly different movement each time. If players lunge or squat, they do it several different ways instead of repeating the same lunge. Domenik ended up in the same place. He still does some dynamic stretches, but he asks players to do them differently each time, and sometimes just says "figure it out."

If you aren't ready to drop stretches, change how they're done. A Constraints-Led Approach to Coaching Basketball gives four swaps, and the earlier book, Transforming Basketball, has a video of the same idea. That book also makes a wider point: identical warm-up routines, however well meant, offer little value in mitigating injury risk, because players who can move adaptively are better placed to respond to a dangerous situation.

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21 SSGs for Your Next Practice

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Replacing the routine doesn't mean dropping the physical preparation. Domenik starts every warm-up from a checklist he credits to the strength coach Charlie Weingroff, plus one item of his own:

1. Raise tissue temperature.
2. Prepare the mobility players already have. (He's clear a warm-up won't increase it.)
3. Prepare the central nervous system, a signal that practice is about to start.
4. Rehearse the movements of the sport.
5. Make the warm-up environment a little representative of basketball, so the gap between the end of the warm-up and the first drill is small.

Then come his four unwritten rules:

• No warm-up should ever be the same. This is harder than it sounds. A game that went well can come back, because players remember it and might play it a little better.
• Players should forget they're warming up. They should be thinking about the game, not the warm-up.
• High energy. He's loud on purpose, because if he doesn't bring it, he's not sure the players can.
• Everyone moves. On a long practice day where the first drill is live, he picks a game where everyone moves enough.

He also builds up to the games. With pros, he starts on the floor and stationary, then locomotion, and only then a tag game, which "isn't something you can do out of the blue." Youth players, in his experience, need less build-up, though they still need some.

Domenik counts at least 130 to 150 practice sessions a season that start with his warm-up, at 12 to 15 minutes each. George Vaz made the same calculation for his own team in the best warm-ups for basketball practices:

That time can go toward skill work. As George put it to Domenik, a team short on time for skill development can add ball handling or passing into the warm-up.

Domenik keeps each warm-up game short, three or four minutes at most, because he only has around 12 minutes. He can't spend a minute in the middle explaining rules and setting out equipment. Three of his games follow, with the rules as he described them on EP155.

Alex's own suggestions on EP37 are in the same spirit: tag games, touch American football, or soccer where defenders can't tackle and the player with the ball has three seconds to dribble, pass or shoot, so the defense can only win it back by intercepting.

Tag and Keep-Away Games from Our Books

Our two coaching books include warm-up games with full rules. The first is a tag game that Transforming Basketball says is "also beneficial as a warm-up", and it works with one ball per pair.

A Constraints-Led Approach to Coaching Basketball uses a bigger version, 2-on-3 Touchdown Tag, as a warm-up for teams turning the ball over against pressure: two offensive players with one ball have to reach the half-court line with dribbles or passes while three defenders try to steal it. The same book's passing warm-up is a rondo, which it rates as a very effective warm-up for first-touch, zero-second decisions.

With beginners, or when you only have one ball, the book suggests 4-on-4 No Dribble Tag: the offense passes and moves without dribbling, and the defense tries to tag the player with the ball. Keep it inside the three-point line, play 30-second bursts with the most tags winning, and allow one dribble after a catch once players are comfortable.

A Passing Game for Groups of Three

George Vaz remembers spending nearly an hour at a childhood camp on dribble, pivot and pass line drills. His version adds a defender and a way to win.

If ball protection is the theme of the day, use Shield Tag: a ball-handler, a defender and a teammate acting as a shield, played in a small space like the center circle. The Routledge book calls it a very effective warm-up that also lets players explore deception they can take into the pick and roll. The rules are in our ball-handling guide and on the Shield Tag activity page.

Partner Battles and Equipment

Wrestling and battling games are part of our player development framework as an alternative to stretches and routines, and the constraints are easy to change. George Vaz's article on combat games includes Fight for the Line: two partners on a line push to get the other's feet over it, or both grip one basketball and use it as the lever. Agree the contact rules and pairings before you start.

New equipment changes the constraints too, so players have to find new movement solutions. Domenik keeps a locked cage of odd balls, rubber frisbees and foam balls, because "if you come up with weird equipment, they always get like excited." In our PVC pipe warm-up, players find different ways to interact with a pipe, and can invent their own games with it.

Several of these games come from other sports on purpose. On EP125, Martina Navarro, a senior lecturer in skill acquisition at the University of Portsmouth and UK director of the Athletic Skills Model, explained the idea of donor sports: games that use movements basketball shares, in a context that doesn't look like basketball. Volleyball still asks players to throw, catch and hit. She also suggests sports that use movements basketball doesn't, such as kicking or climbing.

Her tip for the warm-up: pick a sport with a different movement solution, make a game of it and keep changing it. George Vaz's team played 8-on-8 or 7-on-7 volleyball, depending on numbers, and it became one of their favorite games of the season, partly because nobody was very good at it. Domenik says the energy goes up as soon as it's football, "because they wanna win." George's donor sports article has more.

Domenik's most important rule for choosing a game is that the goal has to be achievable. If it's too hard, players lose interest fast. We'd call that the optimal challenge point, the difficulty being just right for the players in front of you. George's four steps for designing a warm-up game cover the rest: a purpose, the rules, how players win or lose, and how you'll simplify or progress it without removing the important information, such as the defender.

It won't always work. Domenik says games flop "all the time", and some he wasn't sure about go "completely wild." He reflects after every practice on what went wrong and how to do it better, which is how razzle-dazzle football went from "so-so" to one of his favorites.

When Domenik first thought about adding a game, his instinct was "that's not professional... We cannot have fun, right?" The players' feedback changed his mind. Transcending Basketball makes the same argument: fun has become synonymous with wasting time in basketball circles, and it doesn't have to be.

Domenik's fifth checklist item is that the step from the end of the warm-up to the start of the first drill should be small. A warm-up can introduce the situation you'll work on later. If the day's focus is passing under pressure, the three-player passing game leads naturally into keep-away with more receivers and defenders. Tag and partner games are there for the movement problem they give players, not as a rehearsal of a basketball possession, so follow them with the basketball activities the day needs.

Before moving on, check who's been involved and how they're moving, and whether the next activity needs a gentler start or a bigger challenge. It also helps not to oversell what the warm-up did. Toward the end of one season, one of his players threw a full-court pass for a layup and pointed at Domenik on the bench: that's because we play football all the time. Domenik's verdict:

For where the warm-up fits in a full session, see our practice planning guide. For games to play once players are warm, see the small-sided games guide. George's rate limiter warm-up article shows how to pick a warm-up game around a player's rate limiter, the factor stopping a skill from emerging.