Warming up is essential before you start sporting. This makes sure that your body is ready to perform the drills. It can also take your mind from your daily life and make it focus on playing volleyball. You have to warm up every part, from legs to arms and fingers. Most coaches just focus on the legs while neglecting the other areas. Let’s take a look at some drills that can prepare players for a training session or match. Music can often make warm-up drills more fun.
Fun warm-up games: keep it entertaining
A fun drill is to take 2 players. They have to pass to each other while they are running over the court and have to go under the net without touching it. Then one of these players has to aim at the antenna on the net. The goal is to hit the antenna with the ball. This requires a lot of coordination and precision. This drill is explained in more detail in the following video as well:
You can switch it up by adding other targets as well so that players need to focus on aiming the ball in the right direction. A basket can be used for this that can be moved over the whole court.
A drill that is a lot of fun is to stand with 5 players in a group. 4 players pass to each other. The player in the middle has to try and take the ball. If this player is able to do this, he or she starts to pass and the player that lost the ball has to stand in the middle to try and take the ball. This can be very intense and you can push players to pass faster if they are not making any mistakes. This warms them up and also improves their passing technique. A lot of players are great at passing slowly but find it hard to do this under pressure. This drill helps them with this as well.
Passes are a great way of warming up as players can work with the ball so it is fun to do. At the same time, they also need to pay attention as they don’t want to drop the ball. Volleyball players are often very competitive and adding a challenge or a scoring system to the warmup, can push them to work harder and pay more attention. At the end of the warmup, you can announce the winner and this can motivate some players. This might be too much for beginners as they are still learning how everything works but can be a great nudge for more advanced players. It is still important that they keep focussing on their technique as speed is not everything.
You can also let the players play a quick match amongst each other. There can be a timer to push players to play fast and score a lot of points. A lot of people enjoy doing this so it is a great way to get started when some players are not that excited about a training session.
Easy warm-up exercises: warming up without gear
A lot of warm-up drills focus on running and don’t activate the rest of your body. Swinging your arms while running can be a great start to getting these warmed up. You can also do crunches and handstands to do this. Players often don’t like these drills that much as you don’t use a ball when doing them so you can keep them rather short.
These are great to do if you don’t have a lot of balls (for example when you are playing in the sports arena of another team). In some instances, there is also not that much space to warm up. A great trick can be to arrive earlier so that you have the whole court to warm up. The players can also jump up and down a few times to get all the parts of their legs active.
Often a lot of players are warming up at the same time. You have to make sure that people don’t run into each other as this can end their training session or match. Players have to be aware of what is happening around them and have to communicate with each other. A ball that is rolling around can make someone trip so players have to be careful. If there are a lot of players on the court, it can be harder to perform certain warmup drills. An agility ladder can be a great idea in this situation as it makes sure that players don’t get too close to each other. This helps players to improve their feet’ movement and coordination.
The coach can indicate how intense the warmup has to be. In some instances, for example, when it is cold in the sports arena, it can help to do this more intensely. In other instances, for example, when the coach wants to discuss a lot of theory, the warmup might be less powerful. The coach will often indicate this before the warmup starts.
To conclude, we can say that warming up is more than just running around over the court. Make sure that your whole body is warmed up so that you can win the match! After a warmup, you should feel slightly winded but not too tired.
It often takes about 15 minutes so that there is time left for other drills that focus on technique and strategy. At the beginning of the season, warmups might take longer as players still need to get used to high-intensity drills. Switching it up from time to time is essential as warmup drills can get quite boring after a while if you have to repeat the same ones all the time. It can take some preparation from the coach to do this but can motivate a team.
