I wrote yesterday about how I see pre-training movement
screens fitting into the yearly programming for strength and conditioning
professionals. I’m hoping today to give a little bit more insight as to how
exactly I see strength and conditioning professionals putting those assessment
and screen scores to work for them. I should note that I’ve only been using
scores from pre-training screens like the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) for
3-4 years and I’m certain that the way I implement the system is far from
flawless. I try and stick to the principles of the system as much as possible
and keep things as simple as possible when there is a score that grabs my
attention. As I alluded to in my previous blog: bigger, faster, and stronger is
still the ultimate goal, just not at the expense of available and healthy.
At Heilman’s Performance we collect scores on the Functional
Movement Screen (FMS). You can purchase a kit that will aid you in the entire
screen and in my opinion; it’s the most efficient process that provides you
with the most valuable feedback on the functions of the neuromuscular system. Most
people can get through a screen on an athlete or client in 9-12 minutes. By the
end of it you can have a pretty good idea of how that person moves and any “red
flags” that may need retraining or any referrals that need to be made. The FMS,
in my opinion, gives you the best start. The great people at functional
movement systems have since come out with other assessments like the Y-Balance
Kit and the Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA - which is a
breakout for clinicians when pain is reported). We don’t use either of these
methods yet in our athlete assessments at Heilman’s Performance.
This is the best crash course (I know you guys are busy)
I’ve found on YouTube highlighting the 7 tests that make up the functional
movement screen.
It’s important to let you guys know that I’m not just
promoting the functional movement systems. It just happens to be the screen
that we use as our check and recheck at Heilman’s Performance. What I’m trying
to encourage is that you have SOMETHING to
provide you with feedback before you start throwing exercise prescription at
people. The basic questions we want to help people with are:
Do you have a screen? Any screen?
Does it provide you with usable feedback?
How do you use that feedback?
And do you have a method to check whether or not the screen
is improving?
Ok, now let’s get a bit more specific about how some of
these scores affect a strength and conditioning session. Again, this is just
how I let individual scores guide me through my program design. I encourage you
to find a screen that works for you and your clients, and develop your own
methods of helping to improve it.
As of this writing, I use pre-training screens to affect my
program design in one of three ways:
Applying Regressions
This is the idea of taking a fundamental movement (like a
squat) and finding a more efficient way to train it than the way initially
proposed. Most people understand squats, so I think it makes for the best
demonstration. A lot of people jump immediately into back squatting (where an
athlete or client rests the bar at the top of the shoulders at the base of the
neck) when they first learn to squat. I would consider the back squat one of
the most advanced strength training exercises you can apply to an individual,
whether they are an athlete or a member of the general population. I generally
use back squats with my more advanced high school and college athletes, but
it’s pretty rare in my programming. So let’s just assume, the back squat, is
our top tier exercise for the squat pattern, here is a simple example of how I
might regress it.
Back Squats
Front Squats – Switching the load to the front of the
body generally helps provide counter balance through the movement and allows the
athlete/client to load the joints structures of the ankles, knees, and hips
more safely. Young athletes are also less likely to overload this exercise.
Nestling a rugged steel barbell against your throat isn’t exactly an enjoyable
experience for most.
Goblet Squats – An easy way to provide counter
balance to the movement without the kinesthetic awareness that a barbell
requires. Sometimes our “under the bar” experience makes us forget that the
weight room isn’t the most comfortable place to be for a lot of people, and
barbells can be scary. Loading with a dumbbell can allow you to train the
movement with sufficient resistance, without putting an athlete into fight or
flight mode.
Air Squats – Performing a squat without load is still
a squat, bro. And besides, gravity is pretty strong.
Assisted Squats – This is where you can have a client
hold on to a fixed barbell or a TRX to keep them upright as they move
throughout their squat pattern.
Exercise Omittance
At Heilman’s Performance we use certain red flag scores that
we get from our screens to tell us when we should just avoid some exercises
entirely. It’s not to say that we don’t think training all the fundamental
movements are important, it’s just to say that in some instances, we can get
the stimulus we desire from something else. That something else should allow us
to take the 5 steps forward we all want without taking 10 steps back somewhere
down the road. In my next blog I’ll discuss this further in depth with each test
score we collect but a good example off the top of my head would be:
An asymmetrical shoulder mobility score = no bilateral
barbell pressing.
We see instances all the time that one shoulder in an
athlete has considerably more mobility than the other. Until that asymmetry is
cleaned up, I don’t see any reason for them to be trying to apply the equal
amount of work to a single implement (a barbell). A lot of asymmetries in
shoulder mobility will come from previous injuries or as structural adaptations
made by the individual depending on their past experiences (e.g. Most baseball
players). Because of these changes made due to past stressors, some people may
never have a symmetrical score on a shoulder mobility test. THAT’S OK! Just
don’t let them get under a two hundred pound barbell and bounce it off their
chest or push it overhead multiple times. You’re taking two sides, one more
capable than the other, but you’re expecting them to split the work 50/50.
Sounds like a disaster in the workplace, but it’s something we should take into
account in the weight room too.
Again, I need to stress that I think pressing is important,
I just think that for this population a landmine press (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCfcGei-NqM)
or a single arm press with a dumbbell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVM2S2KWX6Q)
would be better options.
Exercise
Prescription
We use standardized functional movement scores at Heilman’s
Performance to assess mobility and stability through the fundamental human
movements. It would only make sense, then, that we design our programs to
reflect the information that we collect from those assessments.
The way we do that is to train a certain number of movements
at least twice per week. As long as the movement score dictates that an athlete
or client can control a certain movement through a safe range of motion we
apply an exercise that fits the individual, their goals, competitive sport,
training ability, and training phase.
If all movement scores are clean, the movements I make sure
to train at least twice per week are:
Squatting – Back Squatting, Front Squatting, Goblet
Squatting.
Hip Hinging – Deadlifting, Kettlebell swinging,
Olympic lifting.
Stepping/Lunging – Most any exercise performed on a
single leg.
Pushing – Bench pressing, overhead pressing, push
ups, Turkish get ups, planks etc.
Pulling – DB or barbell rowing, suspension trainer
rowing, or pull ups.
These are five of the fundamental movements that we can get
pretty good feedback on via our screens. I’m also convinced that if you took
just these five movements, and found a safe way to train all of them at least
twice per week, you would have pretty well rounded athletes and clients. HOW you train each and every movement
should be dictated by the information that you gather from your pre-training
screens.
These movements provide a good platform for our initial
program design. As I said before, anything else we decide to add could be
dictated by a number of variables. Our baseball and hockey players, for example,
tend to have more rotational power exercises mixed in. Our sprinters work with
the sleds and Woodway treadmills more often. If an athlete’s goal is to
deadlift 400 lbs, and I think we can safely pursue that goal, I’ll try and
design a roadmap to that goal. The
key is that every program we design covers a safe way to train
squatting, hinging, stepping, lunging, pushing and pulling. Everything else is
exactly that… Everything else.
One good example of how exercise prescription is dictated by
pre-training screens would be this:
A person who can’t touch the shins below their knee caps
without rounding over at their lower back probably doesn’t need to pick up
anything from the floor just yet. Bring the barbell or implement closer to them
first, and work on their ability to hinge their hips effectively. Or, if it’s
an athlete, that you insist on moving load, try a Romanian deadlift, where the
athlete starts with the load at the top and only hinges as far as their hips
will allow.
Finding a screen that will tell you whether or not your
client or athlete is ready to perform any of these movements under sufficient
load should be something you take care of before you start prescribing any
exercises. In my next post, hopefully this week, I’ll provide you with more
examples of how I use specific feedback from the FMS and other movement screens
to dictate how I regress, omit, and prescribe certain exercises, but I hope
this was a good start.
As always, thank you for reading,
Caleb Heilman
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