Assessment.
People don’t like the feeling of being judged, especially by strangers. Yet when you work with a coach or personal trainer for the first time, an assessment is pretty much standard procedure—a way to gather data to better determine a starting point. In short: an assessment guides the trainer to help find the safest and most efficient path to a client’s goals. That said, I think many of us approach assessment the wrong way.
The Peculiar State of Fitness Assessments
I’m not attacking assessment, and I’m not here to say there’s only one right way to assess a client. You know your clients and athletes better than I do. Whether your tool of choice is the Functional Movement Screen, the Selective Functional Movement Assessment, PRI, DNS, FRC, NASM, ACE, or something else, every method has strengths and weaknesses. As you gain experience, you’ll likely revise your approach, mix and match modalities, and refine your philosophy of training. Ideally, assessment should be a broad mix: reaches, rolls, carries, squats, hinges, toe touches, twists, presses, bicep curls, and more.
Here’s Gray Cook’s definition of assessment, which I think is solid: “In the assessment you take your education background, your professional wisdom, the particular situation, the time constraints, other historical information like medical history or previous problems—and put all that together. That’s an assessment.” It’s hard to argue with that.
My simpler take: “Can the person in front of you do stuff?”
I’m not attacking anyone, but I’ve seen many fitness professionals use the initial assessment as a search for every possible dysfunction. It becomes a long laundry list of things people “lack” or need to fix, shown to the client to prove how much they suck. If someone hears that, they’re likely to shut down.
Be careful of telling someone to “F— off.”
There’s a lot to discuss about assessment, but my biggest gripe is when coaches place too much emphasis on resting, static posture. Some high-end gyms use postural assessments as an upsell, with a person standing before a large grid, hooked to probes that beep at different points. It can feel like a scene from a scary movie.
As physical therapist Dr. Jarod Hall pointed out, even twenty of the world’s top athletes can have great range of motion, strength, and control, yet show significant variation in static posture. Static posture is almost useless for predicting injury or pain.
Posture is a position, not a death sentence. As Dr. Quinn Henoch, another smart physical therapist, puts it: posture is always relative to the task at hand and the load. If you ignore those two things in an assessment—and skip movement, repetition, speed, and other factors—you’re not being smart.
So what should an assessment look like? I’m not sure there’s a single answer. You know your clients. One thing I’m certain of: it benefits a trainer to get clients moving. I’m not saying you should ignore static posture entirely, but it shouldn’t be the sole basis of your assessment. It’s all information, but load changes everything when it comes to movement and even posture.
Many coaches are reluctant to load clients on Day One. For example, most people aren’t great at bodyweight squats, and we’re quick to assign an arbitrary number that supposedly defines them. Add load. Try a goblet squat or a plate-loaded front squat, and you’ll often see a dramatic improvement. It can show the client they’re not broken.
That, in itself, is an assessment. Add load, add variety of movement, and don’t rely only on static posture to assess your clients. And if a pair of rubber gloves ever makes an appearance, well—different topic.
