Colin Griffin represented Ireland in the Olympics and works at Santry Sport Clinic. In this blog Colin goes into detail about functional screening.
Functional Screening Players and Athletes
Functional screening of athletes and players is common practice nowadays. Identifying movement deficiencies that places an athlete at high risk of injury or limit performance is critical if performance is to be optimised. Both injury and performance limiting factors have a cross-over. You need to be healthy and relatively injury-free to perform at your very best. You also need to move well to achieve high levels of speed, power and efficiency.
As a coach and clinic practitioner working in both performance and injury rehabilitation environments, I screen some movement patterns of athletes and players I work with. I ask myself two questions – what exactly am I screening for and how can the outcome of the screen best inform my training or rehabilitation programme. I make sure that that the movements I screen are relevant to the athlete - taking into account their injury history and the movement demands of their sport.
Functional screening of athletes and players is common practice nowadays. Identifying movement deficiencies that places an athlete at high risk of injury or limit performance is critical if performance is to be optimised. Both injury and performance limiting factors have a cross-over. You need to be healthy and relatively injury-free to perform at your very best. You also need to move well to achieve high levels of speed, power and efficiency.
As a coach and clinic practitioner working in both performance and injury rehabilitation environments, I screen some movement patterns of athletes and players I work with. I ask myself two questions – what exactly am I screening for and how can the outcome of the screen best inform my training or rehabilitation programme. I make sure that that the movements I screen are relevant to the athlete - taking into account their injury history and the movement demands of their sport.
The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) by Gray Cook had a strong influence late in my competitive athletics career and early on in my coaching career. While it can provide a good picture of an athletes movement patterns and limitations, it does not tell you how an athlete or player copes with impact and gravitational loading as well as tissue load tolerance. The work of Kelvin Giles and more recently that of Ian McKeown provides a good solution to the need for factoring sport-specific demands into an athlete’s screening programme. But I feel there is nothing wrong with a coach or practitioner designing their own battery of screening tests.
We must remember that most injuries occur or at least tissue is placed under greatest stress when impact forces are being absorbed. The ability to apply stiffness and the ankle, knee, hip and trunk to minimise ankle dorsiflexion, knee flexion (and knee valgus), hip adduction and internal rotation moments as well as maintaining pelvic/trunk stability is key to absorbing such forces.
We must remember that most injuries occur or at least tissue is placed under greatest stress when impact forces are being absorbed. The ability to apply stiffness and the ankle, knee, hip and trunk to minimise ankle dorsiflexion, knee flexion (and knee valgus), hip adduction and internal rotation moments as well as maintaining pelvic/trunk stability is key to absorbing such forces.
The best screening can be done by watching an athlete perform his or her own sporting activity whether it’s running, decelerating, changing direction, jumping, throwing, catching or landing. A good coach should be able to objectively compare their athlete’s biomechanical features with the desired technical model of their sporting activity. If there is a large deficit, one must question if the athlete’s kinematic features are placing greater load on the body’s structures and increasing risk of injury. The challenge a coach/practitioner faces is whether to make technical changes to reduce local tissue loading or to target the strength training programme to improve tissue load tolerance and support the athlete in their self-optimised technique? Or perhaps a combination of both approaches to provide a safe zone?
I would still use an overhead squat or just a normal squat pattern with most athletes. Compensations in a squat can give us clues. Movement limitations that emerge can be further investigated up by assessing local joint range of motion. I often use a single leg squat to assess control of trunk and pelvis as well as hip rotation and adduction. I would assess the athlete’s ability to control landing by using a simple double leg and/or single leg landing from a low box or step. I would look at joint stability at the moment of impact and the ability to hold that flexed position for 2 seconds after impact. I would also include and ankle rebound test to look at ankle stiffness and ability to maintain short ground contact times and optimise musculotendinous unit function.
For injury-prone athletes and players it is useful to include some muscle capacity test for key muscle groups such as calf-achilles complex, hamstrings, hip and trunk musculature – all key injury hot spots. A simple isometric muscle endurance test will provide useful information about the athlete’s ability repeatedly produce force and resist fatigue in those muscle groups. By doing these tests unilaterally we can gain an insight into left versus right leg discrepancies. Further tests can be done to measure eccentric strength under fatigue.
Screening athletes and players can be time consuming and provide enormous amounts of data. It is important to test what is relevant and be smart in utilising the data when prescribing the training or rehabilitation programme. As coaches our key objectives are to keep athletes training in a healthy state and improve their performance.
I would still use an overhead squat or just a normal squat pattern with most athletes. Compensations in a squat can give us clues. Movement limitations that emerge can be further investigated up by assessing local joint range of motion. I often use a single leg squat to assess control of trunk and pelvis as well as hip rotation and adduction. I would assess the athlete’s ability to control landing by using a simple double leg and/or single leg landing from a low box or step. I would look at joint stability at the moment of impact and the ability to hold that flexed position for 2 seconds after impact. I would also include and ankle rebound test to look at ankle stiffness and ability to maintain short ground contact times and optimise musculotendinous unit function.
For injury-prone athletes and players it is useful to include some muscle capacity test for key muscle groups such as calf-achilles complex, hamstrings, hip and trunk musculature – all key injury hot spots. A simple isometric muscle endurance test will provide useful information about the athlete’s ability repeatedly produce force and resist fatigue in those muscle groups. By doing these tests unilaterally we can gain an insight into left versus right leg discrepancies. Further tests can be done to measure eccentric strength under fatigue.
Screening athletes and players can be time consuming and provide enormous amounts of data. It is important to test what is relevant and be smart in utilising the data when prescribing the training or rehabilitation programme. As coaches our key objectives are to keep athletes training in a healthy state and improve their performance.