May 2021 - 28

Strength & Conditioning
CREATIVE SOLUTIONS TO
IMPLEMENT FMS SCREENINGS
AT THE HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL
By Colin Peuse, Director of Athletic Performance,
Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory, San Francisco, CA
Contributing Writer
S
ince its inception over 20 years ago,
the Functional Movement Screen (FMS)
has been a game-changer in the area
of health and human performance. It has
greatly impacted the fields of medicine,
physical therapy, personal training, and
athletic performance. For athletes, it caused
a paradigm shift that fundamentally changed
the way training is approached and the way
programs are written. It gives coaches great
insight on assessing movement quality and
identifying overall injury risk, as well as the
value of corrective exercise. More importantly,
it gives strength and conditioning coaches
a bridge to fulfill their stated purpose of
injury prevention, and a tool to help firmly
demonstrate that.
In my experience, the FMS level 1 & 2 courses
are well worth the money and should be taken
in order to fully understand the system and its
implementation. However, one of the weaknesses
of the training seminars is that it is taught from
the perspective of an individual practitioner.
There is little advice given about how to
conduct screening on a massive scale with a
large number of athletes. It is assumed that
you will have enough time to conduct the
entire screen on an individual and get a final
score. That is relatively easy to accomplish
with a physical therapy patient or an individual
training client, but it is a major challenge to do
the same with an entire athletic department
multiple times per year. As with a lot of training
decisions, it comes down to the ever-present
argument of what is ideal versus what is
realistic. Sure, it would be ideal if one individual
coach conducted the entire screening for each
athlete. But that is not realistic for most sports
28 | Training & Conditioning | Video Playbook 2021
performance coaches working at the high
school level that train hundreds of athletes
often without the luxury of large staffs. In
this environment, the entire approach must
be modified in order to get the same level
of benefit. In some ways, it takes an entirely
different line of thinking that is contrary to
what might be ideal, with a team rather than an
individual approach at its center.
OUR APPROACH
When we screen our athletes using the
FMS, we utilize the seven main tests and the
scoring procedures for each one as is intended.
However, in order to screen a high volume of
student-athletes efficiently, we break from
established protocol in a few key ways. For one,
we do not have the same coach conducting all
the screens on an individual athlete that day.
Each coach is assigned one of the tests, and
screens student-athletes on just that one test.
The coaches each receive an equal number of
student-athletes, and once they screen one and
the results are recorded, they are passed along
circuit-style to the next coach until they finish
all the tests that day. If a coach has completed
their group, they can help other coaches finish
their screens to speed up the process.
The second modification we make is that we
do not try to get all the screens done in a single
day, as time is often limited. We split it up over
two days, even with relatively small groups. If
it is an exceptionally large group, it may take
three. On day one, we perform the following
screens: Deep Squat, Shoulder Mobility, Hurdle
Step, and the Trunk Stability Pushup. On day
two, we conduct the Active Straight Leg Raise,
Inline Lunge, and Rotary Stability screens.
May 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of May 2021
