Creating Chaos - For Fitness & Sport Professionals

As coaches and fitness professionals, one of the first steps with any new client is finding out their current state in terms of posture, stability and movement. Crucial information if the exercise programme developed is going to have any realistic relevance to their current physical state.

The common movement screens include squats, lunges and hurdle steps. All completely valid assessments that each gives a unique perspective but are we missing anything? In our experience, there are some major ignorances that the industry can often forget when conducting movement screens with clients so here's a couple of top tips to helps make your movement assessment as accurate and useful as possible:

• Whenever you mention the word posture, clients (who sometimes don't realise they're doing it) pull their shoulders back, puff their chest out and stand the head tall. You're not wanting to assess whether or not they can stand to attention but get a snapshot of how they hold their body. Get your client to jump up on the spot a few times or march on the spot for 10 seconds with their eyes closed before settling; then look to start observing posture. An immediate photo is the easiest way as this can be studied for longer as well as being referred to for benchmarking and raising your client's awareness.
• Asking a client to perform a familiar movement isn't necessarily giving you the information you want. If you ask a client to squat, they'll then go on to perform their own interpretation of a squat. This could be based upon their own personal experience which may not be the technique that you're personally looking for. Bearing in mind that for decades, squats have been taught as feet parallel, hips down to level with the knees, knees no further forward than the toes etc. Instead of basically assessing their cognitive association of the term squat, simply give a command instructing the movement sought e.g "With your feet flat, take your hips as near to the ground as possible and then return to standing"
• There is a fine line between testing the body's ability to perform movements and then testing the local strength or endurance of the musculature. If you're looking to test just movement then no more than 3 or 4 repetitions of the movement should be performed. Persisting beyond this will challenge stamina which is a completely different assessment. A de-conditioned individual or athlete would likely demonstrate fatigue, affecting movement performance and rendering any observations as limited.
• Demonstrations are useful but if possible, screens should be done without. For showing new exercises, demonstrations are vital and should always be used but movement screens bring out individualities of movement. Everyone has their own unique natural alignment and again, giving instructions for the movement will help profile your client towards giving their most natural preference towards approaching that movement. A demonstration would then start to assess your client's ability to accurately interpret a visual representation, potentially obscuring their own natural performance to mimic your technique.