A Neuromuscular Warm-Up Protocol for High School Lacrosse: Design, Rationale, and Application

The Warm-Up Protocol

Phase 1: Raise Core Temperature

The goal here is to blood moving and tissue warm before we ask anything demanding of the body.

1. Half-lap jog (after which we move in continuous flow in lines)
2. High knees — 10–15 yards
3. Butt kicks — 10–15 yards
4. Carioca — 10–15 yards each direction

Phase 2: Dynamic Mobility

Athletes move through this sequence while traveling down the field. Each exercise flows into the next, covering range of motion across the hip, knee, ankle, and thoracic spine.

5. Knee Pull to Chest — 5 reps per leg, 2-second balance hold at top
6. Heel Pull — 5 reps per leg, 2-second balance hold, hands on hips
7. Hamstring Scoops — 8 total reps
8. Walking Lunge with Rotation (to knee side only)— 5 reps per leg
9. Side Lunge — 5 per side, 2 to 3 second pause at bottom
10. Toe Walks — 10–15 yards
11. Heel Walks — 10–15 yards

Phase 3: Plyometric and Braking Preparation

This phase introduces force absorption, teaching the body to decelerate safely, which is where many non-contact injuries occur.

12. Snap-Down — 5 total reps Cue: “Snap, hips back, quiet feet, stick.” Progress to: Jump and Stick
13. Low Pogo Hops — 15–20 total hops
14. Shuffle to Controlled Plant — 2 reps per direction, 2-second hold on plant

Phase 4: Activation and Stability (alternate daily)

Choose one of the following, rotating between sessions:

Option A: Single-Leg Hinge — 5 reps per leg; 4 seconds down, 3-second hold, controlled return

Progress to: Warrior pose balance

Option B: Isometric Split-Stance Hold — 1 hold per side; 6 to 8 seconds, half depth, weight slightly forward

Phase 5: Speed and Lacrosse Transition

The warm-up closes by building back toward full sport speed in a controlled, progressive way.

15. Progressive Acceleration Runs — 2 reps to 70% effort, 1 rep to 85%
16. Progress to: 45 degree Cut and Accelerate — 2 planned cuts (1 each direction); 1 coach-directed reactive cut

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Introduction

A quick disclaimer before we get into the protocol: I am not a certified athletic trainer or strength and conditioning coach. I am a Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) coach, which means I complete mandatory injury care and prevention training each season. I am also an athlete who has logged a significant amount of functional training, rehab, and yoga over the years to recover from injuries and to train. More importantly, I am a teacher, coach, and parent of a teenage lacrosse player who has observed high school lacrosse players over a long enough period to notice patterns in how and where they get hurt.

This warm-up protocol draws on current best practices in sports medicine and movement science, is shaped by the injuries I see most commonly on the lacrosse field, and is built to be run independently by athletes, with some critical interventions introduced by a coach over the course of the season for movements that require instruction or progressive development. Below is the full five-phase protocol, followed by the rationale behind its design.

This warm-up protocol draws on current best practices in sports medicine and movement science, is shaped by the injuries I see most commonly on the lacrosse field, and is built to be run independently by athletes, with some critical interventions introduced by a coach over the course of the season for movements that require instruction or progressive development. A note on how this works in practice: over the course of a season, a warm-up like this will naturally evolve. Exercises get swapped out, progressions get added, and the intensity or focus may shift depending on what practice demands that day. What is presented here represents the general framework and the balance of elements I am looking for given the time we have to work with. Below is the full five-phase protocol, followed by the rationale behind its design.

The Most Common High School Lacrosse Injuries and What Actually Reduces Them

It is common to see multiple players sitting out on the lacrosse practice sideline, dealing with a range of injuries. Some of these are unavoidable given the physical nature of the sport, but many others reflect a broader culture of neglect when it comes to teaching young athletes how to care for their bodies. The dynamic warm-up, rather than something to rush through on the way to the real part of practice, presents an opportunity not only to help prevent injuries and support a successful season, but also to address this gap by teaching basic principles of movement science and self-care. From my experience as an athlete, coach, and parent, instilling these habits in teenagers requires repetition and patience.

In lacrosse, the most common injuries often include ACL tears, ankle sprains, hamstring strains, shoulder strains, groin pulls, lower back strains, and hip flexor strains, as well as overuse conditions such as patellar tendon irritation, medial tibial stress syndrome (shin splints), and chronic hip tightness. These injuries rarely occur randomly. They are typically associated with rapid deceleration, cutting, sprinting at high speed, rotational shooting mechanics, repetitive loading, asymmetrical movement patterns, and fatigue. Because of that, preparation must be structured rather than improvised. A consistent dynamic warm-up performed three to five times per week, ideally lasting between twelve and twenty minutes, allows athletes to progressively load joints and rehearse the mechanics most associated with injury risk. At the high school level, a twelve to fifteen minute sequence before every practice and on game days provides enough exposure to build adaptation without creating fatigue. Research consensus suggests that what matters most is not flexibility alone, but neuromuscular training: eccentric hamstring strengthening, single-leg balance and control, proper landing and deceleration mechanics, and progressive sprint exposure. In other words, short but intentional neuromuscular preparation, repeated consistently, is far more protective than random drills or isolated stretching routines.

The Most Important Concept

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about warm-ups and injury prevention is this: injuries usually do not happen when we accelerate. They happen when we decelerate, when we stop, plant, or change direction.

Acceleration is concentric force, meaning muscles shortening to create movement. Deceleration is eccentric force, meaning muscles lengthening while trying to slow movement down. Eccentric force places greater stress on muscles, tendons, and ligaments. It requires precise timing and joint alignment.

Most non-contact ACL injuries occur during cutting or landing, when the knee collapses inward under deceleration load (Hewett et al., 2005). Most hamstring strains occur not during push-off, but during the terminal swing phase of sprinting, when the hamstring is lengthening under tension to decelerate the lower leg before foot contact (Schache et al., 2009; Chumanov et al., 2011). Understanding this changes how we think about warm-up design entirely.

Progressive Exposure: The Underlying Principle

Protecting joints is not just about loosening up. It is about gradually exposing the nervous system and connective tissues to increasing complexity and load. Joints become safer when they are progressively introduced to greater range of motion, increased asymmetry, eccentric braking forces, multi-plane movement, and higher velocity.

We do not jump straight into high-force cutting and sprinting. We layer stress gradually, from simple to complex, from low load to higher load, from slow to fast. The goal is progressive exposure. Because injuries tend to occur not during smooth acceleration, but during deceleration when force must be absorbed and controlled, the warm-up must build toward that demand deliberately, not arrive at it suddenly.

What the Research Says Actually Works

Flexibility alone does not prevent injury. This is one of the most persistent misconceptions in youth sports. A hamstring that is loose but weak is still a hamstring that will strain when it is asked to absorb force at high speed. The goal is not range of motion in isolation. It is strength and control throughout that range.

This distinction matters especially for female athletes. Research has consistently shown that adolescent girls tear their ACL at four to six times the rate of their male counterparts in the same sports (Hewett et al., 2005). This is not primarily a flexibility problem. It reflects differences in how the female body tends to absorb force during landing and cutting, particularly a greater tendency toward dynamic knee valgus, the inward collapse of the knee under load, driven by a combination of anatomical, hormonal, and neuromuscular factors. In practical terms, it means that stretching more does not close that gap. Training the nervous system to control the knee, hip, and trunk under load does.

Research consensus points to five interventions that meaningfully reduce injury rates across field sports: neuromuscular training that teaches the body to recruit the right muscles at the right time; eccentric hamstring strengthening that builds capacity to absorb force while the muscle is lengthening; single-leg balance and control that develops the stability needed to land and plant safely; proper landing mechanics that train athletes to absorb ground contact through bent knees and neutral alignment rather than a stiff or collapsing position; and progressive sprint exposure that reintroduces high-speed running gradually so tissues are not overloaded from a cold state.

The FIFA 11+ Model and What It Tells Us

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for structured neuromuscular warm-ups comes from the FIFA 11+ model, a standardized dynamic program studied extensively in soccer. Research has demonstrated that teams using the FIFA 11+ consistently experience 30 to 50 percent reductions in overall injury rates compared to control groups, with especially strong effects on lower-limb injuries when the program is performed three or more times per week (Soligard et al., 2008). This model emphasizes the very elements we are stressing for lacrosse: single-leg stability, eccentric hamstring strength, controlled cutting mechanics, and proper landing technique. Although the FIFA 11+ was developed for soccer, the underlying principles are directly applicable to lacrosse and other field sports with similar movement demands. Many elite collegiate athletic programs now integrate neuromuscular warm-ups into daily preparation because they improve both performance and durability across seasons.

Why Isometric Work Belongs in a Warm-Up

When most coaches think about warm-ups, they think about movement. But there is growing scientific support for including brief isometric holds, short static contractions, as part of neuromuscular preparation before activity.

What Is Isometric Strength?

Isometric strength is the ability to produce force without changing joint position. In other words, the muscle is working, but the body is not moving.

If you hold the bottom of a split squat and stay still, your quadriceps, glutes, and stabilizers are producing force to prevent you from collapsing, but the joint angle is not changing. That is an isometric contraction. If you balance on one leg and hold a hinge position without moving, your hamstrings and hip stabilizers are active and under tension, but the limb is not shortening or lengthening. That is isometric strength.

This is different from concentric strength, when a muscle shortens to create movement like standing up from a squat, and eccentric strength, when a muscle lengthens while controlling movement like lowering into a squat.

The Science Behind It

Research shows that sustained isometric training increases tendon stiffness, which improves how force is transferred through the joint (Kubo et al., 2006). In a sport like lacrosse, built on cutting, planting, and rapid direction change, that stiffness translates directly to more stable knee and ankle mechanics.

It is worth being precise about what the isometric holds in this warm-up are and are not. The holds used here, split-stance holds and single-leg balance pauses, are brief, moderate-intensity efforts. They function as neuromuscular preparation: activating stabilizing muscles, cueing joint alignment, and priming the nervous system before higher-intensity work. They are not a substitute for a structured strength program and will not produce the same tendon adaptations as a dedicated, high-load isometric training block performed over weeks. That distinction matters, and it is worth naming honestly. What brief warm-up isometrics do offer is meaningful: they reduce the transition from rest to full-speed movement, reinforce the joint control patterns that protect against injury, and may enhance subsequent explosive output through post-activation potentiation mechanisms.

Separately, lower isometric hamstring strength has been associated with greater hamstring injury risk (Opar et al., 2015), suggesting that athletes who develop stronger isometric capacity over time through training carry greater resilience into high-speed movements.

Large structured prevention programs like FIFA 11+, which include controlled landing, single-leg stabilization, and brief static holds, have shown injury rate reductions of 30 to 50 percent in studied populations (Soligard et al., 2008). The common thread across all of them is neuromuscular control, not stretching. For coaches, brief, well-coached stabilization holds are a daily, low-cost investment in joint awareness and movement quality. In high school settings where athletes may not receive structured strength supervision year-round, that daily exposure adds up.

The Role of Balance and Yoga-Informed Training

Single-leg balance work and yoga-derived movement patterns address a different but related problem: proprioception, or the body’s ability to sense joint position in space. Athletes with poor proprioception, particularly at the ankle, are at significantly elevated risk for sprains and re-injury (McKeon and Hertel, 2008). Balance exercises train the small stabilizing muscles and sensory feedback loops that allow an athlete to recover from an unexpected surface change, a body check, or an awkward landing.

Yoga-informed training contributes here through its emphasis on controlled breathing, body awareness, and stability in asymmetric positions. While the research on yoga specifically in lacrosse populations is limited, its functional overlap with balance, hip mobility, and single-leg control makes it a practical complement to field-based preparation.

How This Protocol Connects to the FIFA Model, Yoga, and MCPS Training

Several exercises in this protocol were not chosen arbitrarily. They are drawn directly from three sources: the FIFA 11+ framework, foundational yoga poses such as Warrior, and the MCPS Care and Prevention of Athletic Injuries training that coaches in this county are required to complete. The single-leg hinge is one example. It appears in all three contexts and targets the same movement vulnerabilities the FIFA model was built to address.

Eccentric hamstring strength. The FIFA 11+ places strong emphasis on exercises that train the hamstrings while they lengthen under tension. This matters because most hamstring strains do not occur during push-off. They occur during the terminal swing phase of sprinting, when the hamstring is lengthening to decelerate the lower leg before foot contact (Schache et al., 2009; Chumanov et al., 2011). Lacrosse demands repeated high-speed sprinting, especially in transition. The slow-tempo hinges and controlled eccentric patterns in this protocol directly address that risk.

Controlled landing mechanics. The FIFA 11+ includes repeated jump-and-stick drills that train athletes to land with proper knee alignment and trunk control. Research on ACL injury consistently identifies dynamic knee valgus, the inward collapse of the knee under deceleration load, as a primary risk factor (Hewett et al., 2005). In lacrosse, this pattern appears when landing from a jump shot, recovering defensively, or planting to change direction. The Snap-Down and Shuffle to Controlled Plant in Phase 3 of this protocol target exactly this mechanics pattern, training the body to absorb and control braking forces before they are encountered at full speed.

Trunk and hip control. Core stability is not about abdominal strength for its own sake. It is about maintaining alignment so that force transfers safely through the lower extremities. Poor trunk control increases knee loading during cutting. In lacrosse, high-velocity rotational shooting adds another dimension: repeated torque through the thoracic spine and hips. The walking lunge with rotation in Phase 2, and the balance and hinge work in Phase 4, both address this, reinforcing stacked rib-cage-over-pelvis positioning and building the rotational control that supports durability across a full season.

The yoga influence operates in the same territory. Poses like Warrior train single-leg stability, hip control, and proprioceptive awareness in asymmetric positions, exactly the physical vocabulary a lacrosse player needs when cutting, planting, or absorbing contact on one leg. These are not separate traditions being awkwardly combined. They are different paths to the same underlying goal: a nervous system and musculoskeletal system that can handle what the game demands.

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The Rationale: Why This Sequence?

Raising Temperature First

Cold muscle is less pliable and less responsive. The jog and locomotor drills in Phase 1 elevate heart rate and increase circulation to working muscles before any stretching or loading begins, consistent with standard warm-up physiology.

Dynamic Over Static Stretching

Research consistently shows that static stretching before activity can temporarily reduce muscle force output. Dynamic mobility, moving through range of motion under control, prepares tissues without that cost. Every exercise in Phase 2 is chosen to address the joints and planes of motion most stressed in lacrosse: hip flexion and extension, lateral hip mobility, ankle dorsiflexion, and rotational trunk control.

Teaching the Body to Brake

The majority of non-contact ACL injuries in field sports happen during deceleration, cutting, landing, or planting, not acceleration. Phase 3 is built entirely around teaching athletes to absorb force with control. The Snap-Down specifically trains the posterior chain to catch the body on landing. Pogo Hops develop ankle stiffness and reactive tendon function. The Shuffle to Controlled Plant mimics the exact movement pattern of a defensive cut or lateral repositioning in lacrosse.

Activation Without Fatigue

Phase 4 targets the glutes and single-leg stability, two areas consistently implicated in lower-extremity injury risk in adolescent athletes. By alternating between the hinge and the isometric hold across sessions, athletes train both the movement pattern and the static strength demand without accumulating fatigue before practice has even started.

Finishing at Sport Speed

The final phase bridges the warm-up to practice by gradually reintroducing full-speed effort. Progressive acceleration runs prevent the common mistake of going from a slow warm-up directly into a sprint drill. The cut progressions, when added, layer in cognitive load, planned versus reactive, which better prepares the nervous system for the unpredictability of live play.

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Conclusion: The Case for Movement Literacy

There is a broader point worth making here, one that extends beyond lacrosse and beyond warm-ups. As a substitute physical education teacher across Montgomery County Public Schools, and a former Division I and high school lacrosse, soccer, and basketball coach, a ski coach, and a youth club lacrosse and basketball coach, I have had an unusual vantage point across a wide range of athletic settings and age groups. Across all of those settings, the pattern is consistent: PE students may receive yoga and athletes may receive a quality dynamic warm-up, but rarely is either group taught the connection between the two or given the knowledge base to understand why what they are doing matters. When an athlete pulls a knee to their chest and balances for two seconds, braces their core through a lunge, holds a single-leg hinge, or pauses at the bottom of a side lunge, they should understand what they are doing and why, in the context of the principles explained here.

That gap matters. Functional movement literacy means understanding how the body produces, transfers, and absorbs force, and why that understanding protects you across a lifetime of physical activity. It is not currently a consistent part of either athletic or physical education in most high school settings. It should be. An athlete who understands why they are hinging, holding, and decelerating before they sprint is not just better prepared for that day’s practice. They are building a framework they will carry into every sport, every workout, and every physical challenge they encounter for the rest of their life. That is the deeper purpose of a protocol like this one: not just injury prevention for a single season, but the beginning of a lifelong relationship with intentional, informed movement.

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References

1. Soligard, T., Myklebust, G., Steffen, K., et al. (2008). Comprehensive warm-up programme to prevent injuries in young female footballers: cluster randomised controlled trial. BMJ, 337, a2469.
2. Hewett, T. E., Myer, G. D., & Ford, K. R. (2005). Biomechanical measures of neuromuscular control and valgus loading of the knee predict anterior cruciate ligament injury risk in female athletes: a prospective study. The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 33(4), 492–501.
3. Opar, D. A., Williams, M. D., & Shield, A. J. (2015). Hamstring strain injuries: factors that lead to injury and re-injury. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 49(14), 909–914.
4. van Dyk, N., et al. (2019). Including the Nordic hamstring exercise in injury prevention programs reduces hamstring injury rates in soccer players: systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53(21), 1362–1370.
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8. McKeon, P. O., & Hertel, J. (2008). Systematic review of postural control and lateral ankle instability, part II: Is balance training clinically effective? Journal of Athletic Training, 43(3), 305–315. https://doi.org/10.4085/1062-6050-43.3.305
9. Schache, A. G., Wrigley, T. V., Baker, R., & Pandy, M. G. (2009). Biomechanical response to hamstring muscle strain injury. Gait and Posture, 29(3), 332–338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gaitpost.2008.10.054
10. Chumanov, E. S., Heiderscheit, B. C., & Thelen, D. G. (2011). Hamstring musculotendon dynamics during stance and swing phases of high-speed running. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 43(3), 525–532. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0b013e3181f23fe8