Down, set, record: Assessing warm-up structure and use of neuromuscular training exercises in Canadian adolescent tackle football

Implementing injury prevention strategies is critical for coaches and sport organizations to promote player safety. Neuromuscular training (NMT) warm-up programs that involve aerobic, strength, agility, balance/coordination, and head-and-neck control exercises have demonstrated injury rate reductions of >35% across many adolescent sports. Tackle football (i.e., American football) has amongst the highest injury rates within youth sport and lacks examination of current warm-up structure and exercises. Our video-analysis study examined footage from 23 practice and game warm-ups (46 total) to document the duration and exercises completed for nine adolescent (males, ages 14–17) tackle football teams over a 9-week season within Calgary (Canada). We found that teams typically spent less than five minutes actively warming-up with most exercises being aerobic (51%) and dynamic stretching (29%), while <10% of exercises involved static stretching (6%) or NMT components of strength (9%), agility (3%), balance/coordination (1%), and head-and-neck control (1%). Warm-up length and use of NMT components were similar between games and practices, and over the season. Our findings demonstrate that NMT exercises are not being used in tackle football, which supports future implementation and evaluation of a tackle football-specific NMT program. We also provide coaches with a method for examining their team's warm-up structure.