Checking the Boxes: If You’re Going to Think About Movement, Where Should You Start?

Written by Gray Cook FMS

I’ve been thinking about movement all of my life.

I consider myself an average athlete with average physical ability, but I’ve always had an eye for quickly spotting good movement patterns. My brain draws lines like vectors of gravity and triangulations of momentum. I can’t explain it, but I’ve spent most of my professional career trying to articulate that.

When I became a professional, I felt my intuition about movement needed to be checked. I needed quicker and better feedback to make sure I was objective about what I thought I was seeing. To be honest with myself and those I was trying to help, I wanted to set a baseline—I never wanted to professionally trust my intuition. My intuition can lead, but before I take action, I make myself a few check boxes—boxes so simple most would agree in principle. If we agree in principle, we must strive to practice our principles.

As a professional, whether you’re educating, rehabilitating, training or coaching, it is your responsibility to help other professionals find value in your intervention. When I got into physical therapy, personal training and even coaching, I found out everyone always thinks they can do it better than the other professional.

Go ahead and look at studies. Almost 93% of drivers polled feel like they’re above-average drivers. If that’s the case, then that’s going to be a bell curve like we’ve never seen before. Not every driver is above average. Many are average or below average, but the perspective is limited to extremely subjective criteria. This is illusory superiority in action. But what do the facts say?

If we could all have a little chuckle and realize we still place ourselves in the category of above-average drivers while assuming other people are incorrect in their appraisal of their skills. Now, we might be able to understand how this can also occur professionally.

If you’re wondering about movement and you’d really like to go on a journey of self-discovery that is going to give you some feedback, these questions are a good starting point:

1. Can you accurately guess someone’s movement vital signs and competency just by looking at them, watching them exercise or seeing them move around in activity? 

2. Can your client, patient, or athlete guess their own movement vital signs and competency? 

3. Do you have an objective feedback loop for a single session?

I’d like you to mentally check the boxes by these questions if you feel very strong and confident about your ability or the situation. First, we need to agree on a baseline.

Let's consider the Functional Movement Screen or our healthcare movement assessment, the Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA).

1. Can you accurately guess someone’s movement vital signs and competency just by looking at them, watching them exercise or seeing them move around in activity?

If you’ve already answered the question, you’ve made a mistake. Look at someone move, guess their score and then do a movement screen or SFMA Top Tier. Better yet, get someone else to do it, because now you’re not interfering with the objective data.

If you can’t guess someone’s movement vital signs and competency, then you either feel that it’s unnecessary information or you just admitted that your eye for movement needs to be trained and needs to have a feedback loop that it does not currently have. If you guessed correctly, the follow-up question is: How often does your guess agree with the objective baseline?

2. Can your client, patient, or athlete guess their own movement vital signs and competency?

You might be surprised here because just like driving, people will either overestimate their movement abilities or far underestimate their movement abilities. Some unfit people assume they move poorly and some fit people assume they have no movement dysfunction.

Both are guessing while standing 10 minutes from the truth.

As we already know, some individuals we have to push while we hold others back. The guidance we do on each independent movement pattern may be different depending on the way they screen.

Let’s get a touchstone on which we can both agree. Let’s hold to this anchor of objective movement appraisal—looking at patterns.

From a scientific standpoint, if your patterns are good, we shouldn’t break down your parts and processes, unless you have a history to show that the breakdown is prudent. If we observe no dysfunction in your behavioral patterns, including your movement behavioral patterns, then we could easily break things down—but why would we?

Why wouldn’t we move forward to more complex patterns if the basic patterns are competent?

If your patterns are good, we shouldn’t break down your parts and processes.

Bad patterns deserve to be dissected, good patterns deserve not to be dissected.

Logically, there’s no reason to go down the rabbit hole of reductionist thinking if the behavioral patterns are average or above average. This does not suggest that movement cannot be improved, it simply suggests that if you are not where you want to be, movement is probably not your chokepoint or bottleneck. Go into more complex behavioral patterns like performance, sport specificity or higher levels of physical conditioning.

If the basic patterns are out, why would you go more complex? There’s no foundation for the building that you’re getting ready to build.

3. Do you have an objective feedback loop for a single session?

Body composition, muscle hypertrophy, development of the physique or even sport skills take weeks and even months before we can measure true change (remarkable adaptation) – tangible change that’s going to have an obvious effect.

However, the human neurological system will often move better (improved quality) in a single five minute session. We’ve done case studies all along. When we use the movement screen or our healthcare movement assessment, the SFMA, to find the bottleneck in movement, we attack a single pattern, knowing well that the single pattern does far more than simply change itself. It can change other patterns as well—if it’s the weakest link it can affect the entire chain, and that can be measured.

When we throw the right corrective at the right pattern at the right time, movement changes in a single session. I hope you can check this box one day.

The question always arises, “Well, how long will it hold?”

That depends on what you do to reinforce it. If negative movement behaviors or unproductive movement behaviors (i.e. too much overhead lifting with too poor a technique) is what you’re doing, then the first order of business in the movement appraisal is to remove the negative (insulting action on a bad pattern)—not to add a positive (corrective effort on a bad pattern).

Apply the rule Protect before Correct. Hippocrates said “First, do no harm,” Protect before Correct accomplishes this goal.

Why would we try to correct something that’s probably environmental? We’ve often said unless somebody has a compelling past medical history or pain on the movement screen that would demand a medical second opinion before they exercise or stress their body to a certain degree, we’re not going to consider the organism to be broken.

In biological terms, we all have to make a decision: Do we choose to modify the organism or do we choose to modify the environment? When I’m trying to activate a muscle I don’t feel is firing, I am literally trying to manipulate the organism.

In most cases, when an organism is broken or not responding, they’re not going to do better without some form of holistic and systematic medical intervention, regardless of the environment you put them in.  It doesn’t mean we’ll always find a medical problem, but we will find something that should be evaluated medically to reduce inappropriate stress on a vulnerable body system.

Remember: Protect before Correct

If you simply have dysfunctional patterns in your movement screen or assessment, it is the knee-jerk reaction of the trainer, coach, or clinician to automatically assume the organism is broken. I compel you to look at a different place: in my opinion, if the individual doesn’t have a past medical history or pain with movement, I would encourage you to change the environment first.

Environment = Lifestyle + Program

The best-of-the-best professionals should tweak and adjust the environment—the practice session, the lifestyle (rest, recovery, regeneration, unnecessary stress and unnecessary laziness). If you’re going to make these changes in somebody’s program, you’ve got to base them on much more than your own opinion—to make sure you’re on the right track, but also to demonstrate to them that their confidence in you is well-placed.


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1 Comments

  • author

    Marko 2/23/2015 1:28:53 PM

    Hello Mr. Cook, 


    As always, I am very happy when I see, again always, a  brilliant blog...
    I am beginner in FMS philosophy and every your information is really important for me.

    Thank you for that and I am proud to be one of you...

    Sincerely, 

    Marko Beljaković