Functional movement & Olympic athletes

By Nicole Pelletier, CSCS

 

In the past five years, strength training has shifted from training individual muscles to training movement patterns, which has been coined ”functional training.” For example, using a leg-curl machine to isolate knee flexion for hamstring strengthening can be replaced with leg curls on a stability ball, which not only focuses on hamstring strengthening but also glute activation, rotational stability and pillar stability. Thus, muscles accompanying the hamstrings in athletic movements are activated through the stability ball leg curl – a functional exercise.

 

In the May 2006 edition of North American Journal of Sports Physical Therapy, Gray Cook, Lee Burton and Barb Hoogenboom stated that many strength and conditioning programs address strength, speed and agility, but lack in addressing quality and efficiency of movement patterns.  Movement patterns found in athletics involve squatting, lunging, reaching and rotating. Optimal movements require proper joint alignment, mobility, stability and symmetry when executed with varying degrees of force through all planes of motion. All aspects of optimal movement are required in sport and are addressed through functional training.

 

With the movement toward functional training, assessing movement patterns prior to strength training has become essential. The National Academy of Sports Medicine includes the squat and single-leg squat as part of their functional assessment for athletes. Gray Cook and Lee Burton created the Functional Movement Screen™ (FMS) to identify movement deficiencies, muscle weakness and imbalance. The FMS consists of seven basic movements: squat, lunge, hurdle step, shoulder mobility, pillar stability, active straight leg raise and rotation. Both of these screening methods can provide quantitative information to help create functional based programs that improve the movement quality and efficiency in athletic movements.

 

Focusing on training movement patterns versus individual muscle groups not only applies to strength training but also to improving overall athletic performance. Women’s Olympic Hockey player Angela Ruggerio, as reported by Boston Globe’s Shira Springer on January 17, 2010, began training with a more functional approach over the summer as she prepared to enter her fourth Olympic games. Her workouts focused on movement pattern efficiency and form (functional training), which improved her speed, agility and power development. Angela reported making the largest power and strength gains in her Olympic career, returning to the Olympic training camp stronger than her younger teammates.

 

Athletes like Angela are noticing large strength and performance gains with less time lost due to injury with implementation of functional training techniques. Therefore, should all athletes participate in a functional movement screen as part of their pre-participation screening and focus a portion of their training regimen on improving movement patterns to increase athletic performance?

Comments

[Michael]

I enjoyed reading this article. I wish every strength and conditioning coach would be required to read it. As I learned coaching in the NFL, if you can't move, you can't play. Obviously, they were talking about speed, but we can use the same phrase for general athletes.

Often times, young athletes will be influenced by poor decision-making coaches who emphasize increasing size and strength will equate to better performance. But again if you can't move your body in an athletic and efficient manner, then you won't be able to play up to the level you could be playing at if you spent more time learning how to move efficiently and correctly. If you are moving efficiently with movements, then you will be better able to produce maximal force when it is needed in your athletic event.

Thankfully, in the last 5-6 years, this way of training is becoming more mainstream, but it will be hindered further by the "old-school" coaches who are deficient in "out of the box" thinking, and in their inability to adapt to safer and better training methods. Strength and conditioning coaches need to keep reading great works by Gray Cook, Mike Boyle, Stuart McGill, Shirley Sahrmann, Eric Cressey, and others in order to stay on top of this new found training methodology that is truly the foundation of all other athletic attributes. Strength and conditioning, along with athletic training and physical theraphy should not be considered a factor in wins and losses, but should be taken into consideration for reducing and treating injuries, recovery, and overall athletic skill improvement.

[alexandra demetriou]

Good post. Quality movement patterns are not just for athletes! I see so many people in my clinic who come in with vague aches/pains and decreased function because they have poor movement patterns associated with their every day life (work, leisure activities). I wish this type of information would get into the hands of the public in general. We would be a much healthier society.
alexandra demetriou, OTR/L CHT
www.signaturehandtherapy.com