How a Mental Warmup for Exercise Can Improve Your Workout

The results are amazing: a simple tweak to your warm-up routine improves mile time by two to three percent. That’s the key finding of a new study testing the effect of “combined cognitive and physical warmups,” in which you limber up both body and mind before exercise. Is this a magical new warmup style that will sweep the world? I’m not so sure—but I do think the results tell us something important about what a good warmup does (and doesn’t) do.

What the Study Found

A research team at the University of Birmingham in Britain, led by Hannah Mortimer, recruited 25 recreational runners to run a series of three one-mile time trials. They were experienced but not elite runners, with average mile bests of 6:47 and average 5K bests of 23:31, training roughly 20 miles per week. The results appear in the European Journal of Sport Science.

The three time trials were identical except for the warmups. In each case, they did a physical warmup consisting of a 1,200-metre jog followed by four 100-metre strides and a few minutes of drills such as lunges and high knees. Before two of the trials, they added a cognitive component to the warmup: three minutes of cognitive exercises before the jog, the strides, and the drills, for a total of nine minutes.

The cognitive exercises were performed on a phone app called SOMA-NPT, which provides a battery of cognitive tasks. The tasks they were assigned taxed cognitive functions like task switching, memory updating, response inhibition, cognitive interference, and decision-making. Notably, these same tasks are used in mental fatigue studies to harm performance. If you do them for, say, half an hour, your brain feels wrung out and (according to some but not all interpretations of the data) you perform worse on endurance tasks.

The shorter bouts of these tasks, on the other hand, are intended to act as “priming”: to get blood flowing to the brain, perhaps, or trigger a flow state, or some other yet-to-be-determined benefit. The rationale isn’t entirely clear, to be honest. But the results are: the runners were faster after the cognitive warmup. There were actually two versions of the cognitive warmup, one easier and the other harder, but they had essentially the same benefits.

The headline result, of course, is the mile time. The runners were 8 seconds (2.0 percent) faster after the easier cognitive warmup and 11 seconds (2.8 percent) faster after the harder one compared to the physical-only warmup. This is a big deal: people pay a lot of money for fancy shoes and bespoke supplements that almost certainly do less. And so, inevitably, it makes me think of David Epstein’s Second Law of Stats in the News: “Tiny interventions almost never lead to massive effects.” Whenever “this one weird trick” promises to change your life, you should be very wary.

Can We Trust These Findings?

My initial assumption when I see results like this is that they’re a fluke. You run a study, you measure a bunch of outcomes, and by chance, one or two of the outcomes will show a big change. In this case, though, Mortimer and her colleagues have measured a bunch of outcomes, and they all seem to point in the same direction. That’s more interesting.

Here are two examples: rating of perceived exertion, which is their subjective sense of how hard the mile was (measured after each lap then averaged); and average heart rate during the mile.

Not only did the runners go faster after a cognitive warmup (labeled here as “Combined-low” and “Combined-high”), they also felt slightly easier and had a much lower heart rate, by seven or eight beats per minute. Now the cognitive warmup is starting to look like magic!

There’s one other graph that I think is important, showing their self-reported readiness rating, on a scale of one to ten, immediately before the time trial:

This is the biggest and most obvious difference between the conditions: after the cognitive warmups, the runners were champing at the bit and ready to run.

What Is a Warmup for, Anyway?

I’ve written about the science of warmups a bunch of times over the years, with the general hope that understanding the purpose of warmups would help me optimize my own routines. There’s a lot of theoretical info about what warmups do, mostly having to do with the benefits of raising body temperature: increased blood flow, decreased stiffness, more rapid metabolic reactions, faster nerve conduction rate, and so on.

But studies that look directly at performance tend to produce underwhelming results, at least for endurance events (jumps and sprints are different). One study that I wrote about compared two fancy warmup protocols… but neither of them improved performance compared to the control condition of no warmup whatsoever. And yet athletes—including me—swear by the importance of warmups.

Another study, published back in 2024, offers a clue. Italian researchers had volunteers perform a running test to exhaustion in three different conditions: after a regular warmup; after a regular warmup plus some fancy drills from the FIFA11+ warmup protocol; after the same regular-plus-FIFA11+ warmup, which they were told would enhance their performance. Sure enough, the fancy warmup itself didn’t improve performance, but it did when the runners were told it would. It was a placebo warmup effect.

I should pause here to note that there’s actually solid evidence that the FIFA11+ warmup reduces injuries in soccer players by about 30 percent. That’s a huge deal. It’s unlikely to have exactly the same injury-prevention benefits in endurance activities, but it’s still an important reminder that the benefits of a warmup may extend beyond what you can measure in an immediate performance test.

As for the benefits of a cognitive warmup, it seems telling that the effects were essentially the same in the easy and hard versions, which were set at relative intensities of 20 and 70 percent. That fits with the idea that the most important effect was giving the participants the sense that they’d done something cool that was going to help their subsequent performances, as reflected in their super-high readiness scores. Maybe that somehow translates into a different nervous-system state, which produces a lower heart rate and other benefits.

Or maybe there really is a cognitive priming effect that’s specific to the cognitive tasks they did. It’s impossible to know either way without more research. But I think this study and others like the earlier Italian one point to an important new direction of warmup research: figuring out how to get athletes into the right mental state. If a phone app can get me into the zone—and keep my mind off the pain to come—then I’m open to the idea.

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