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FMS 10/23/09 Any cycling team which does not conduct at least the bare essentials for an objective test of riders' basic functional movement before starting competition and training may as well dress up in pink and admit they are not a team but a club of vanity weekend warriors more interested in appearance and fashion than actual riding. A good job of testing and establishing a baseline (in case of injury) can be done with just these 5 movements:
You might think of them as triage for team qualification, and an objective grading system for them is explained in Gray Cook's book: Athletic Body in Balance: optimal movement skills and conditioning for performance. The book looks like this:
There are also DVDs available which add some refinements to the movements plus tests for shoulder mobility and a special pushup to check core stability. The grading system for each movement is simple: zero to three.
I know you are thinking that I should be charging Gray Cook for pointing this out and publishing these photos which should entice anybody with a brain, a body, and a goal, to buy the book, the DVDs, take some seminars, etc. Of course I should charge him, but I am absolutely certain he does not have nearly enough money to make it worth my while. On the other hand, I cannot resist helping good solid information get slightly more exposure. Those who have seen my step-test for cycling and read about the hip-hike test I developed for Mary will notice extreme similarities. In fact I found Gray's book after Mary's hip-hike problem remained so persistent I wanted to make sure something wasn't missing before I started putting together the chapters about this sort of stuff in Cycling Performance Simplified. Happily, the shuttle step (shown above) even adds an element to the test I had been giving Mary. I probably shouldn't bother showing you people this, because after Toe Clip's amazement at what he learned doing my cycling step-test and Spun Crystals introduction (which could be seen as sport specific extensions to the more generalized ones above) I asked, "Aren't you involved in that school soccer program? Don't they go over this with the players?" He said, "We are just happy if they show up." I know the feeling, but I'm more happy if they don't.
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