Warm ups are essential for pre game athletic performance or hitting the gym. There may be a better way to optimise your time, especially if you are doing excessive warm ups. Anything more than 10 minutes could be a waste of time and is dependent on what sport you undertake.
First goal is to elevate your heart rate
Either through running warm ups, skipping, ropes or even on a bike.
This allows you to notify your body that you are getting ready to exercise through your sympathetic nervous system which controls our fight or flight response.
Increasing body temperature
Having a higher heart rate helps warm our tissues up which reduces the risk of injury.
Mobility
Now that the body is warm and we have small sweat on, time to explore our range of motion through our joints. Working on movements that will prepare you for certain actions in a sport or a certain lift for the day.
Activation
This is where we need to prime our movements and be a bit more specific for the task at hand. Need to load movements that are either bodyweight or light loads. This will help firing of the neurotransmitters and prime you to really engage maximum effort for movements and lifts. For the deadlift as an example, working on glute firing with glute bridges can help hip extension. Even exercises to help brace our core with planks and bird dogs can help provide trunk support.
Punch line..
A study conducted by William et al 2020, showed no difference in athletic performance between two seperate Rugby groups with one completing a 10 min warm up and the other 30 min. This shows that we can be more effiecient with our time when it comes to preparation.
Reference:
Williams, R. D., Gillham, S., Highton, J., & Twist, C. (2020). The influence of warm-up duration on simulated rugby league interchange match performance. Science and Medicine in Football, 1-7. doi:10.1080/24733938.2020.1819558