Injury Prevention & Performance Optimization Screening

How to identify your weakest link

Fundamental Movement Analysis

Unless you understand how the human body is supposed to move it is impossible to identify where yours is going wrong. Fundamental Movement Analysis will highlight your movement dysfunctions, asymmetries, areas of weakness and movement impairments. The way I do this is to screen an individual's movement patterns by asking them to perform a series of basic movements. These are not demanding or complex tasks, they are simple movements that everybody should be able to do, and are the building blocks of safe and efficient sporting activity.  Most people, however, are unable to perform all movements. The process then is to perform corrective exercises at the most dysfunctional movements and address any asymmetries (the leading cause of injury) to regain lost control and flexibility. Reassessment will reveal significant improvements in movement, allowing corrective exercise to be targeted at the next most dysfunctional movement, and so on.

‘These movements are the building blocks of safe and efficient sporting activity’

The great thing about Fundamental Movement Analysis is that it is simple, standardized and an individual can clearly see where their problems lie; they can also see large improvements in their movement following exercise. Often, people are astounded by how poorly they move in certain ways. A modified version is widely used in America in the NBA and NFL (the most expensive athletes on the planet!). It has also been trialed in the US fire service and resulted in a reduction in working days lost to injury by 60%.

‘You cannot be generic about something as complex as human movement’

You cannot be generic about something as complex as human movement. The key is to individualise someone’s needs and apply corrective strategies to specific problems, the aim being to build high levels of clean unrestricted movement patterns, which, when applied to sporting activities result in efficient and well coordinated force generation capabilities.

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