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Warm up activities - what use are they in a development training programme?

One of the first items on the Agenda on many professional or management development or team development events is often a “Warm up activity” of one sort or another.
What is their purpose, what different examples are there and should every training module include one?
There is more than just one purpose of warm up activities. They can vary from:-
- Giving people the opportunity to introduce themselves and say Hello to their fellow participants – which is particularly important if they are strangers to each other.
- Encouraging people to disclose more about themselves, their background and their current state of mind – thoughts and feelings about being on the training module.
- Bringing more fundamental views of the participant's out into the open about the training subject, its objectives and the organisational context that the training exists in – this helps both the participants and the trainer to gauge the confidence, attitudes and behaviours of the participants and to assess how willing they are to be there and to learn.
- Giving all participants the opportunity to communicate and to get their voice heard and warmed up early on – in readiness for them to make more important contributions later on in the training.
- Relaxing the participants and encouraging them to feel comfortable in the training environment, with each other and involved in the module – rather than being more of a bystander.

Warm up activities can be verbal, non-verbal, indoor or outdoor activities and can be either neutral, individual or team orientated or directly related to the subject matter of the training itself.
When it comes to a team development event then I would invariably include some sort of warm up activity in order for participants and for me as a trainer to start the process of self-disclosure early on by providing initial evidence of the personalities, attitudes and relationships that exist within the team. This provides first impressions and can help shape the approach that I would take as a facilitator with the team from the outset.
On most other types of training course I would also choose a warm up activity related to the nature of the training subject and the participants and their level of distance or familiarity with each other.
The main exceptions to this would be on highly technical training courses where the approach is more about imparting knowledge in a lecture style, or to very large audiences in a one way communication mode.