Post 18: "Facebook Official"

         Trying to route people around here. Check out "Gamedaystrength Page" on Facebook, or @GameDayStrength on Twitter.

Post 17: The Functional Movement Screen

                                                 

         So as promised (finally) here is my review and opinion on the Functional Movement Screen. It's been a while since I've had the opportunity to update as frequently as I'd like, but the semester is winding down; and even at this school, that can chew up a lot of your time. Anyways, finally getting around to the topic of the FMS as promised in Post 8: Mobility as A Component of Training. Cook has used the analogy of children in many of his lectures and writing that I have come across. The idea that children need to learn the workings of the body by rolling around, moving their heads, stabilizing their cores, mastering manipulation of the extremities and learning to balance are all "training" methods to eventually learn to navigate their environments through crawling and eventually walking. In this regard, Gray talks about young children being symmetrical in muscular development and unexposed to the imbalances they will experience when they become athletes or otherwise physically active.

         Once these kids become athletes is when they begin to use compensatory movement patterns and postural changes in order to accommodate imbalances and poor mechanics. This could not be more true. I used FMS to illustrate a point in a coaching "seminar" recently, and included a practical/lab type component where my peers could have a chance to go through the movements and evaluate each other. These are not athletic people for the most part, and it seemed the greater population had minimal training history. What I saw only made sense until after I thought more about it, these people were scoring high on the unilateral tests and only had noteworthy trouble with trunk and rotary stability. Once I considered the fact that (unless you count PRI evaluation) people who are not consistently active really don't have adequate time to spend developing poor movement patterns and create consequent imbalances. 

         The functional movement screen had three parents, but Gray Cook is the one most recognized in the paternity cases. Cook is a PT and in clinical practice there is typically a lot more static testing for imbalance and compensation in the musculature. Recognizing this, the Functional Movement Screen was born. Finally, something to assess and evaluate the movement patterns of athletes/clients/patients. In Cook's book "Athletic Body in Balance," he discusses a performance pyramid with three components, functional movement (mastery of basic movement patterns,) functional performance (athletic skill/power production,) and functional skills (sport related skill.) The optimal pyramid should look like this: 

                                                       

          A million times, you will hear pyramids used as analogies for everything. In this case, functional movement is our foundation, our base from which to build on. The premise here is simply that if an athlete can not navigate through fundamental and functional movement patterns, they will be limited in the heights they can attain in the functional performance, and functional skill blocks above. The purpose of the "buffer zones" is to illustrate the fact that without a greater foundation, we are limited in the extent to which we can develop the subsequent skill-set. That being said, we will still always encounter athletes who have a greater "functional performance" block, or "functional skill" block, but the fact remains that without increasing the base, the room for improvement will be limited by the lack of a buffer zone, or a base to provide support for growth. This may even mean that sometimes, we will regress in observable performance before we can improve, a one step back, three steps forward type of approach. 

          The beauty of the movement screen is that it is easy to conduct and requires little set-up if you know what you're doing. If you have a well-trained staff and adequate space to set up stations, you can run through a team of 10 in less than an hour. For a test of only seven movements, it still provides a good picture of functional movement for your athletes, and can help you identify weaknesses as well as use the corrective exercises to make adjustments. Identifying and correcting these holes in athletic movement will unlock greater gains in functional performance and supplement the sport-specific skills that much more. Again, it's all about widening the base of support. The wider the base, the taller the pyramid.

-Alex