How Functional Movement Screening Can Turn Your Weaknesses into Strengths

As I wrote in an article called Turn Your Fitness Weaknesses into Fitness Strengths, being fit can boil down to "being able to move through this world with as few limitations as possible." To achieve that goal, we often need to focus on our weakest parts rather than our strongest. The functional movement screen (FMS) is a great way to find those weaknesses.

My job as a coach is to prepare an athlete for the variety of movements they will need to be able to perform in order to participate in their chosen activity. To help with that, I often include some sort of analysis of fundamental movements in their training preparation. This screening can help determine what abilities they possess (or lack), where their strengths are, and where they may need some specific attention. This gives me a great idea of where to start building their fitness program. 

A functional movement screen (or FMS) is a test used to identify asymmetries or deficiencies in an individual’s strength, flexibility and general movement.

At its root, a functional movement screen (FMS) is a test used to identify asymmetries or deficiencies in an individual’s strength, flexibility, and general movement. The FMS aims to identify as many imbalances in mobility and stability as possible, using seven fundamental movement patterns. The seven movement patterns are designed to allow someone like me (coach, trainer, physiotherapist) to observe your performance of basic locomotor, manipulative, and stabilizing movements by placing you (the athlete) in extreme positions where your weaknesses and imbalances are most noticeable. 

Then, once these deficiencies have been identified through the FMS, we can create a program of corrective exercises to shore up those deficiencies before they can cause injury or create poor movement patterns that will be hard to unlearn.

Why correcting imbalances is important

Injuries happen for many reasons, but one of the main reasons stems from strength imbalances. Let’s say you're a runner (defined as someone who enjoys running, you don’t have to be a pro or even fast.) If you have one glute muscle that's significantly stronger than the other, that's an imbalance. It’s not uncommon to have one side of your body be stronger than the other. But ideally, we would work to minimize that. 

If you have one strong glute and one weak one, the quadricep on the weak-glute side is going to have to work harder to make up for your lazy butt. If you think about the running movement, it’s not hard to imagine how this scenario can lead to a lopsided gait and the potential for...

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