Sports & Recreation — Part 3
The Celpip Plus team
Written and reviewed against the official CELPIP scoring criteria
What you'll learn: the phrasal verbs used throughout sports and fitness culture — from preparing your body to preparing your mindset — vocabulary that appears constantly in CELPIP Listening passages about training and in Speaking answers about routines.
Why phrasal verbs dominate fitness talk
Sports culture in English runs almost entirely on phrasal verbs: coaches tell athletes to warm up, teammates team up, and everyone gears up before a big event. Single-word substitutes exist ("prepare," "combine," "ready oneself") but sound noticeably more formal and less natural in this context. Recognizing and using these phrasal verbs correctly signals genuine familiarity with how English speakers actually talk about sports, not just textbook vocabulary.
Two-part structure worth noticing
Several of these follow a "verb + preposition + noun" structure that pairs a specific activity (train, sign up, back out) with a target (for a race, for a class, of a tournament). Learning the whole chunk — not just the verb — prevents the common error of dropping or swapping the preposition, which changes the meaning entirely.
Word bank: sports phrasal verbs
| Collocation | Meaning | Example sentence |
|---|---|---|
| warm up | prepare the body before exercise | Always warm up before a heavy workout. |
| work out | exercise | I work out three times a week. |
| train for | prepare specifically for an event | She's training for her first marathon. |
| team up with | join forces with someone | I teamed up with a coworker for the relay race. |
| gear up for | prepare for an upcoming event | The club is gearing up for the provincial finals. |
| cheer on | support someone loudly | Fans cheered on the home team from the stands. |
| keep up with | maintain the same pace as someone | It's hard to keep up with more experienced runners. |
| back out of | withdraw from a commitment | He backed out of the tournament due to injury. |
| tire out | become exhausted, or exhaust someone | The long hike tired out even the fittest hikers. |
| psych up | mentally prepare or motivate oneself | Athletes often listen to music to psych up before a game. |
| level up | improve one's skill or ability | Joining a stronger league helped her level up quickly. |
| sign up for | register or enroll for something | I signed up for a beginner yoga class. |
Worked example — Speaking Task 1 (personal experience narration)
"When I decided to sign up for my first 10K race, I honestly wasn't sure I could keep up with the runners in my training group. I started to train for it seriously about ten weeks out, and I'd warm up for a full fifteen minutes before every session so I wouldn't get injured. A friend from work offered to team up with me, which helped a lot — we'd psych up together before the tougher runs. Two weeks before race day, another friend backed out of the group entirely after tiring out during a long run, but I pushed through. By race morning, our whole group had really geared up for it, and everyone came out to cheer us on at the finish line. That race genuinely helped me level up as a runner."
Common mistakes
- "Warm up yourself" — "warm up" doesn't take a reflexive object in this sense; simply say "I warmed up" or "warm up your muscles."
- "Train to" instead of train for — the fixed preposition is "for" when referring to an event ("train for a marathon"), not "to."
- "Give up of" instead of back out of — "back out of" is the correct phrasal verb for withdrawing from a commitment; "give up" alone doesn't take "of."
- "Cheer for on" — the correct separable phrasal verb is cheer on (or "cheer someone on"), never combined with "for."
Recap
Phrasal verbs carry most of the everyday vocabulary around training, competing, and supporting others in sports, and getting the prepositions right is what makes them sound natural. Practice by describing your own fitness routine or a time you prepared for an event, working in at least four of these phrasal verbs correctly.