The 10-Minute Warm-Up Every Adult Skater Should Do First
Physiotherapist and skater. Came back to skating at 49 and hasn't stopped.
Most of the adult skaters I treat didn’t get hurt doing something advanced. They got hurt in the first five minutes of a session, on something ordinary, because their body wasn’t ready yet.
At 16, warming up meant pushing to the park and doing a couple of easy laps. Your joints were ready before you’d thought about it. That’s not how it works now. The tissue around your joints is less elastic, your nervous system takes longer to switch from “sitting at a desk” to “reacting on a moving board,” and the opening minutes of a session are when most adult skaters tweak something.
Ten minutes fixes most of it. No equipment, no complexity.
Why this matters more now than it did at 16
Warming up does two things: it increases blood flow to the muscles and connective tissue you’re about to load, and it primes the nervous system pathways that control balance and reaction speed. Both take longer to switch on as you get older. Skip it and you’re asking cold joints and tendons to absorb exactly the kind of sudden, unpredictable load skating produces — a foot catching wrong, an unexpected wobble, a heavier landing than you planned for.
The four areas that go first in adult skaters are the ankles, wrists, hips, and knees, which are also the joints skating asks the most of. The routine below covers all four.
The routine
Do this before every session, not just the ones where you’re planning something ambitious. It works just as well before a mellow cruise as before a park session.
1. Ankle circles and rocks (2 minutes)
Stand with your feet hip-width apart. Rock slowly from your toes to your heels ten times per side, then do ten slow ankle circles in each direction, per foot. Skating asks your ankles to make constant small corrections — this wakes up that range of motion before you’re relying on it at speed.
2. Wrist circles and extensions (1 minute)
Wrists get almost no attention in most warm-up routines, which is a mistake — they’re one of the joints most commonly injured when adults skate. Circle each wrist ten times in both directions, then gently extend each hand back (like you’re pushing against a wall) and hold for ten seconds. This is mobility work, not fall preparation: the goal is a wrist that moves freely under your wrist guards, not a wrist you’re training to catch yourself with. Actually bracing a fall by extending your wrist is how fractures happen — practice falling safely instead, and let your wrist guards do the job they’re designed for.
3. Hip circles and leg swings (2 minutes)
Stand near something you can hold for balance. Swing one leg forward and back ten times, then side to side ten times, then switch legs. Follow with ten hip circles in each direction, hands on hips. Your hips do most of the work in carving and weight shifts — tight hips translate directly into a stiffer, less controlled ride.
4. Bodyweight squats (2 minutes)
Fifteen slow bodyweight squats, controlled on the way down. This warms up the knees and quads through the same range of motion you’ll use absorbing impact and staying low through turns. Keep your weight through your heels and don’t let your knees cave inward.
5. Balance holds (2 minutes)
Stand on one foot for 20–30 seconds, switch, repeat once per side. If that’s easy, close your eyes for the last ten seconds of each hold. This activates the small stabilizer muscles around your ankles and hips that skating relies on constantly and that most other warm-ups ignore entirely.
6. Easy pushing and rolling (1 minute)
Get on the board and push gently for a minute on flat ground. No tricks, no features. This is the transition step, where what you just activated meets the demands of standing on something moving.
A practical trick for making the routine stick: do the first nine minutes in your street shoes when you arrive, then change into skate shoes for the last one. The shoe change gives you a natural cue that the session has started.
Fitting it into a real session
Ten minutes feels like a lot to carve out of an hour. If you’re short on time, cut the session rather than the warm-up — five minutes less skating on a warm body beats five extra minutes on a cold one.
What to skip
Skip static stretching — long, held stretches of a cold muscle — before you skate. It doesn’t warm anything up and can temporarily reduce power output. Save static stretching for after your session, when your muscles are already warm and you’re working on long-term flexibility rather than preparing to move.
If a specific joint is already sore or recovering from something, don’t push it through this routine to “test it out.” Warm it up gently within a pain-free range, and if it doesn’t feel right, that’s your answer for the day.