TY - GEN
T1 - A guide to assessing mobility for strength and conditioning coaches [blog post]
AU - Howe, Louis
N1 - Louis Howe has been coaching international level athletes since 2007, and previously worked for one of London’s top university elite athlete scholarship programs. He currently lectures for the University of Cumbria on the Sport Rehabilitation program. Prior to this position, Howe lectured for the Strength and Conditioning undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at St Mary’s University, where he also provided strength and conditioning services to a group of international track and field athletes. Howe is an accredited strength and conditioning coach with the U.K. Strength and Conditioning Association and is currently completing his Ph.D., investigating compensatory movement strategies derived from ankle dorsiflexion range of motion restrictions during landings.
PY - 2019/7/17
Y1 - 2019/7/17
N2 - Strength and conditioning (S&C) coaches are commonly responsible for programming mobility exercises for their athletes, with the goal to either improve movement quality or reduce injury risk. If you ask a room full of coaches to list the mobility exercises they regularly program, you’ll no doubt receive an endless list of movements along with countless variations. Ask the same group of coaches to list tests they employ that accurately and reliably identify deficits or changes in an athlete’s mobility, and the list will generally be significantly shorter. This is likely the reason so many athletes are prescribed countless shoulder, thoracic, hip, and ankle mobility exercises as part of their routines—if you can’t assess something, better do the exercises to develop it, just in case. This leads to extended warm-ups and “filler” exercises being scattered throughout training programs with little return for improvements in performance. To avoid valuable training time being wasted performing needless mobility exercises, S&C coaches should possess a basic skill set that allows them to reliably measure an athlete’s range of motion (ROM), which underpins fundamental movements. The goal of this two-part series will be to demonstrate ROM assessments that require no specialized equipment, but produce data that is reliable and valid, in order to direct the training process. Part 1 will focus on lower extremity assessments, while Part 2 will cover tests for the upper extremities.
AB - Strength and conditioning (S&C) coaches are commonly responsible for programming mobility exercises for their athletes, with the goal to either improve movement quality or reduce injury risk. If you ask a room full of coaches to list the mobility exercises they regularly program, you’ll no doubt receive an endless list of movements along with countless variations. Ask the same group of coaches to list tests they employ that accurately and reliably identify deficits or changes in an athlete’s mobility, and the list will generally be significantly shorter. This is likely the reason so many athletes are prescribed countless shoulder, thoracic, hip, and ankle mobility exercises as part of their routines—if you can’t assess something, better do the exercises to develop it, just in case. This leads to extended warm-ups and “filler” exercises being scattered throughout training programs with little return for improvements in performance. To avoid valuable training time being wasted performing needless mobility exercises, S&C coaches should possess a basic skill set that allows them to reliably measure an athlete’s range of motion (ROM), which underpins fundamental movements. The goal of this two-part series will be to demonstrate ROM assessments that require no specialized equipment, but produce data that is reliable and valid, in order to direct the training process. Part 1 will focus on lower extremity assessments, while Part 2 will cover tests for the upper extremities.
M3 - Article
JO - SimpliFaster [website]
JF - SimpliFaster [website]
ER -