How To Warm-up for Basketball

Stretching

Make sure and try to stretch all parts of your body, especially those that will be focused on and included in the activity the most.

Do stretches such as:

• reaching for your legs to stretch your hamstrings.
• pulling your legs to your butt to stretch your quads.
• doing back stretches by laying back and placing your left leg across your body to your right arm, or "Hollywoods," which includes placing one leg out straight, the other over it and your opposite elbow pushing against the leg that is up.
• calf exercises by going to a wall and placing one straight leg back to stretch your calf.
• butterflies - while sitting on the ground, place the bottoms of your feet so that they lineup with one another and pull them towards the center of your body and press your knee areas downward towards the ground.

Warm up Run or Static Stretch

• A warm up run is as simple as it sounds: Take a light run or jog around or up and down the court.
• A "static stretch" is very easy and is essentially an active and running stretch. A static stretch consists of you jogging up and down twice, doing butt kickers twice, high knees twice, and karaoke twice. This will warm up your calves, groin area, quads, hamstrings, and gluteus maximus muscles.

Shooting

• Your shot can be warmed up by starting around the basket at close range shots and taking 25-50 shots in order to work on, warm up, and correct your form.
• Secondly, you can take the same amount of shots but at a further distance (about 5 feet or so further) in order to include more strength and power, especially coming from your legs.
• Thirdly, you can move out to midrange and take about the same amount of shots in order to fully warm up all the muscles included in your shots.

Dribbling

You can further warm up your legs and the rest of your body while warming up your dribbling motions by doing dribbling warm up drills such as the following:

• Dribbling up and down the court with your left and right hand.
• Dribbling up and down the court while crossing over every three dribbles with both your left and right hands.
• Dribbling up and down the court while going in between your hands every three dribbles with both your left and right hands.
• Dribbling up and down the court while going around your back every three dribbles with both your left and right hands.
• Dribbling up and down the court while doing a "spin move" every three dribbles with both your left and right hands.