Halftime Re–Warm-Up in Team Sports: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Dressing Room Reality

The halftime interval in team sports provides an important opportunity for coaching feedback, recovery, hydration, nutritional intake, and medical care. However, when athletes remain passive for most of this period, muscle temperature and neuromuscular readiness may decline, potentially impairing sprinting, jumping, change-of-direction ability, and early second-half performance. For strength and conditioning professionals, the challenge is not only to identify effective re–warm-up strategies but also to apply them within the practical constraints of the dressing-room environment. This article reviews the physiological rationale for halftime re–warm-up and provides practical recommendations for team-sport settings. Active strategies such as short plyometric circuits, shuttle-based activity, small-sided games, elastic-band activation, and integrated sport-specific drills may help preserve explosive performance after halftime. Passive heat-maintenance methods may be useful when movement space is restricted, whereas cooling strategies may be more appropriate in hot environments. Because halftime routines are shaped by coaching priorities, available time, space, player fatigue, environmental conditions, and field access, no single protocol is universally optimal. Strength and conditioning coaches should, therefore, prepare flexible, context-specific options. Brief, familiar, and consistently implemented protocols are likely to provide greater applied value than longer or more complex strategies that cannot be delivered reliably during competition.