Due to the large increases of "pleasant" emails and forwarded replies from others to my inbox I will share my thoughts on the current material proposed by Mike Boyle and Gray Cook. Since this is business and I have nothing personally against Mike and Gray I will focus on the information proposed by them in order to keep things fair. Some of Mike's material is fantastic and I suggest being part [...]

The Functional Movement Screen is an assessment that got a lot of heat a few years when Vern and Mike Boyle argued about it's effectiveness. My stance is closer to Vern's as Mike's responses were not very convincing. I was exposed to the FMS years ago when manuals were actually in paper format and experts were older than college graduates. During that time I was reading everything in the office [...]

A good athletic profile or screening will serve a guide for what you need to do next. I do not think an athletic profile, especially done by a coach should go searching for dysfunctions or malfunctions. Remember each sport has adaptive postural response. The longer an athlete participates in a particular sport, especially if it is one side dominant, the more evident the response will be. (An examp [...]

Summer’s over. It’s Fall. On college campuses all across the country, pre-season track training has begun in earnest. And with pre-season training comes the battery of tests that most good coaches use to assess progress and program effectiveness and provide a competitive opportunity to athletes who might not otherwise compete for another 4-6 months. I personally love test week. In my setups, [...]

When it comes to developing hip mobility, hurdle mobility drills typically fall way short of the intended goal.Case in point...I have 5 athletes of varying sizes training together and one set of hurdles set up for step-overs and duck-unders.(Smart guys don't give it away... just wait for it...let the others catch up)The assumption must then be that my bigger, taller athletes have much greater [...]

You have done all your ‘functional screening” and you have found all these restrictions and limitations. What do you do now? How do you approach fixing those things? Can they be fixed or are they part of that individual’s movement signature or fingerprint? Are these legitimate questions and concerns or am I overreacting? I know that I am a coach. As a coach my job is produce res [...]

Mike Boyle send me this rebuttal to my post on the Functional Movement Screen. It is good and though provoking. I still do not agree, but it is good to have diversity of opinion - Vern First let me state that one of my best early sources of education was Vern Gambetta. Vern was a man ahead of his time and was one of the early proponents of what is now called functional training. With that said, [...]

The movement screen developed by Gray Cook has become the newest screen of choice. I admire the hard work he put into developing the screen, but I question the value of the screen. Just because it is measureable does not make it functional. The tests in the screen do not give much information that I can translate to actual athletic movements. They all seem to be ends unto themselves. I know many p [...]