9-Week Basketball Warm-Up Program Cut Sprint Time 0.07 Seconds in 65-Teen Trial

A 9-week randomized trial set a basketball-specific warm-up program against the FIFA 11+ in 65 players aged 13 to 15. The sport-specific warm-up program produced a small sprint-time advantage, while agility and jump gains were effectively identical in both groups.

Warm-up program design is usually filed under injury prevention and then forgotten. A randomized controlled trial published in the German Journal of Exercise and Sport Research on October 1, 2026 asked a different question: whether swapping one structured warm-up for another also changes how fast and how explosively young athletes move nine weeks later.

The trial was run by Fernando Dominguez-Navarro of the Department of Physiotherapy at the Universitat de Valencia in Spain, with Celia Garcia-Lucas, Javier Gamez-Paya, Borja Ricart-Luna, Juan Jose Amer-Cuenca and Juan Francisco Lison. The stated aim was to analyze the effects of a 9-week basketball-specific warm-up program, called Basket-Up, on sprint time, agility and vertical jump performance, comparing them with the FIFA 11+ warm-up protocol.

Sixty-five male and female basketball athletes aged 13 to 15 years were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions. The Basket-Up group had 34 players (age 13.9 plus or minus 1.1 years; height 179 plus or minus 10.7 cm; weight 68.2 plus or minus 11.3 kg). The FIFA 11+ group had 31 players (age 13.8 plus or minus 1.1 years; height 174.3 plus or minus 11.1 cm; weight 64.3 plus or minus 11.6 kg).

Both groups performed their respective programs three times per week for 9 weeks, and outcome assessments included agility, vertical jump performance and sprint time.

The headline result was narrow and specific. Sprint time showed a significant time by group interaction favouring the basketball warm-up program after the intervention, with a mean difference of minus 0.07 seconds (95% confidence interval: minus 0.13 to minus 0.01, p = 0.03) and a moderate effect size of partial eta squared = 0.074. The FIFA 11+ group did not show significant improvements in sprint time during that period.

What the Basket-Up Warm-Up Program Was Measured Against

The FIFA 11+ is not a straw man. It is the most widely disseminated structured warm-up protocol in team sport, built for football and adopted far beyond it, and it has a substantial evidence base behind its injury-prevention claims. Testing a new basketball-specific protocol against it is a harder test than testing against nothing.

That design choice shapes how the results read. When one warm-up program beats another on a single outcome and ties on the rest, the honest summary is that the sport-specific version was better at one thing, not that the comparator failed.

Where the Two Programs Diverged

Sprint time was the only outcome with a between-group difference. The mean difference of minus 0.07 seconds carried a 95% confidence interval of minus 0.13 to minus 0.01, which excludes zero but only just, and the p value of 0.03 sits in the same territory. The effect size was moderate at partial eta squared = 0.074.

An interval whose upper bound nearly touches zero is a real result reported with appropriate modesty. It says the direction is probably right and the magnitude is loosely bounded, which is the normal condition of a 65-person trial in adolescent athletes.

Agility and Jump Improved Everywhere

Both groups improved significantly over time in agility and vertical jump performance, with p values below 0.001 and large effect sizes exceeding a partial eta squared of 0.14. Neither warm-up program held an advantage over the other on these two outcomes.

There is a plain reading of that pattern: in 13 to 15 year olds training three times a week across nine weeks, a consistent structured warm-up program plus normal basketball practice plus ordinary growth produces broad improvement, and the specific choice of protocol only shows up in the most narrowly targeted measure.

Why Hundredths of a Second Are Not Trivial in Basketball

Basketball is played in short accelerations, not in races. A sprint test is a proxy for how quickly a player closes out a shooter, beats a defender to a loose ball or recovers in transition. In that context 0.07 seconds is roughly the difference between arriving a half-step early and arriving a half-step late.

The caution is that a timed straight-line sprint is a laboratory stand-in for game actions, and the trial measured the test rather than the game. Match-level consequences were not assessed, which is a familiar gap in this literature and one that work on plyometric training and match running in young soccer players has tried to close from the other direction.

What a Sport-Specific Warm-Up Program Can and Cannot Claim

The claim supported here is bounded: over nine weeks, in adolescent basketball players, a basketball-specific warm-up program improved sprint time more than the FIFA 11+ did, and matched it on agility and jump. That is useful and it is also modest.

What the trial does not show is that one warm-up program prevents more injuries than the other, that the sprint advantage persists past nine weeks, or that it transfers to adults or to elite players. Nor does it show the effect would hold in a squad training once a week instead of three times.

How to Read This if You Coach Teenagers

The practical message is unglamorous. Both protocols produced large improvements in agility and jump, so the biggest decision a coach makes is not which structured protocol to pick but whether a structured warm-up program happens consistently at all. Three sessions a week for nine weeks was the dose that produced these results.

• Consistency outranked protocol choice on two of the three outcomes measured, so the warm-up program that actually gets done is the one that works.
• Sport-specific content appears to help the most sport-specific quality, which in this trial was straight-line sprint time.
• A 9-week block is a reasonable planning unit for a youth season, and it was long enough here for measurable change.
• None of this is individualized guidance; young athletes with pain, injury history or medical concerns need assessment from a qualified clinician before adding load.

Where It Sits in the Youth Training Literature

The pattern here rhymes with other recent work on adolescents. A trial of multimodal HIIT in adolescent basketball players found meaningful conditioning gains from a short structured block, and research on suspension training for jump and sprint in untrained teenagers showed how responsive this age group is to almost any organised stimulus. Both findings make the broad improvement in this trial unsurprising.

They also sharpen the interpretive problem. When teenagers improve on nearly everything, isolating what a particular warm-up program contributed demands either larger samples or longer follow-up than most of these studies have. Screening work on young athletes, including the review of t-wave inversions on athlete electrocardiograms published this week, is a reminder that adolescent athletes are a distinctive population whose physiology does not read like an adult baseline.