The Beginner’s Guide to Strength Training (Part 5 of 30): Assessment

Without an assessment, you can’t build yourself an optimal program.

You can think of reaching your fitness goals like planning a trip — your destination is your main goal; your starting point is your current fitness level, posture, movement ability, etc; and your route is the strength training program you undertake.

If you don’t know where you want to go nor where you’re starting, it’ll be hard to plan a route. And if you’re not using the right route, you can’t rely on motivators like “try harder,” “work harder,” or “keep pushing” to get closer to your goal.

You might not even be in the right direction.

An assessment, however, shows us our destination, our starting point, and any potential roadblocks or detours. A comprehensive assessment helps us get even more specific: it’s one thing to plan a trip from California to New York (“Uh, go east?”); it’s quite another to plan one from the Santa Monica Pier to Times Square.

Goals

You need to know where you want to go and what you want to achieve. More importantly, you have to be specific.

“I want to get in-shape,” isn’t clear enough. Here are some better possibilities:

• Fat loss? How much?
• Muscle gain? How much?
• Muscle recomposition?
• What areas do you want to focus on (and avoid)?
• What sport do you play? What do you need to improve?
• By when?
• What’s your training history?
• What should we be careful of?

This information is critical in designing a program to meet your needs. A fat-loss program for a beginner, for example, looks completely different from an off-season program for a collegiate hockey player.

Injuries

Many people deal with injuries that limit their exercises and training routines — worse, injuries may lie below the “pain threshold,” which means they don’t feel pain yet.

Knowing what’s injured and what hurts can also reveal movement dysfunctions that maybe causing the injury. That helps a trainer when she’s creating a solid, comprehensive strength program.

But how should you deal with pain? Should you train around it? Is it possible to even fix it?

It depends — with a knowledgeable trainer, it’s possible. I’ve met strength coaches who know more than most physical therapists. And even with legal limitations, they can still prescribe a strength training program that correct all types of injuries.

In my experience, I’ve helped clients fix issues like shoulder and back pain with nothing more than a smart program and much-needed mobility and activation exercises. I’ve also helped clients improve their fitness while suffering through significant, preexisting injuries.

There are times, however, when coaches need to “refer out,” meaning the coach should refer the client to a qualified therapist. In that case, assessments are great to CYA.

Assessment Tools

After your goals and injury history, the final component to a good assessment is some direction in exercise selection and progression. Questions to answer include:

• What are your weak points?
• Do you have any imbalances or asymmetries?
• Where is your mobility limited?
• What type of postural issues need correcting?

While there are numerous ways to gather that information, my two favorite are the Functional Movement Screen and a postural assessment.

Functional Movement Screen

Created by Gray Cook, the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) is a seven-part movement assessment that rates and ranks movement patterns patterns and looks at mobility and stability. Here are the movements:

• Deep Squat
• Hurdle Step
• Inline Lunge
• Shoulder Mobility
• Active Straight-Leg Raise
• Trunk Stability Pushup
• Rotary Stability

There are four possible scores: 0, 1, 2, and 3. You receive a score of 0 if there’s pain; 1 if you couldn’t perform the movement; 2 if you could do the movement with compensation; and 3 if you did the movement perfectly.

“When in doubt, score low.”

Except for the Deep Squat and Trunk Stability Pushup, the exercises are scored separately on their right and left sides to detect any asymmetries in mobility or stability.

And while the FMS probably deserves its own 30-part series because of how in-depth and insightful it is, I’ll just stress this: don’t overcomplicate things.

The FMS is a screen — that’s all. The goal isn’t to get a “perfect score;” the goal is to assess potential weak-links and trouble areas and gather enough data to design a safe and effective strength program. The hard part comes after you determine the score.

Postural Assessments

You can tell a lot by how someone stands and walks.

When standing, do their shoulders slump forward? Does their butt stick out? Do their palms point backward? Are their knees soft or locked? Where do their feet point? How about their knees? Is their head sticking forward? Are their any noticeable tilts or leans? Does the front of their belt point down or up?

When walking, how are the arms swinging? Equally? One more than the other? Do their ankles move? Where are their feet pointing? Out? In? Do both feet do the same thing? Is there a “gangsta” lean?

(Eric Cressey, MA, CSCS, once said he “accidentally” knocks his pen off his desk to see how the client moved to pick it up.)

With that information, you can determine what areas need strengthening, activation, and/or release. If possible, I recommend taking pictures from the front, back, and sides. (Shirtless is preferable.) This allows you to take more time to analyze posture, instead of awkwardly staring at shirtless client. Those photos can also be the “before” photos.

Conclusion

There are a lot of programs available to build strength.

I’ve gained a lot of strength and muscle with the 5×5 program alone. But knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it: the back squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press demand a lot of mobility and flexibility — mobility and flexibility that a lot of people (and myself, at that time) lack.

CrossFit is another popular strength training system. But because the exercises are set, the only way to regress an exercise (make it easier) is to use less weight. But should everyone snatch, clean and jerk, or do overhead squats? Or are most people even able to do those movements safely?

No.

That’s also the failing of bootcamps and group classes — “cookie-cutter” systems to build strength without accommodating the different goals and needs of it’s clientele. Instead, they’re popular because it’s fun, challenging, and builds camaraderie. Those are all fantastic reasons to exercise, but it will never be optimal.

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Stay tuned for the next article where I’ll breakdown (in painstaking detail) all the movement patterns that form the basis of all strength exercises, how they’re different, and the exercises that fall in those categories. If you’re thinking of building a strength program or just want to revamp yours, you don’t want to miss this article.

Throughout this seres, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of questions, so be sure to ask using the comment section of this post. Feel free to reach out to me via Facebook and Twitter to get your question answered. See you soon!