Injury Prevention: The Importance of Annual Movement Screens
Insidious pain is pain that initially occurs for no apparent or obvious reason. Can you relate to that? Most of the time, this pain develops because of an underlying impairment that you don’t know you have, until your body responds with pain. This results in spending time and money getting diagnosed, followed by weeks of rehabilitation.
The good news? There’s an easier way. Movement screens such as SFMA (selective functional movement assessment) can help you identify dysfunctional patterns that cause pain.
Even if you are not suffering from pain currently, you may be moving in such a way that makes you more susceptible to injury. Repetitively moving in a dysfunctional pattern during day-to-day tasks will frequently lead to pain and injury. Let’s look at a specific, common example.
About 80% of adults suffer from low back pain at some point in their lifetime. Many times, there is an underlying, dysfunctional movement pattern that is making you more likely to injure your low back. Some common examples include:
Tightness in the front or back of your thigh
Our hips provide our bodies with mobility to move through life. They move in many planes of motion and have extensive support from ligaments and muscles. Due to the excessive amount of sitting that we do on a daily basis, tightness can easily arise in the front and back of our thighs.
Stiffness in the upper back
The effects of gravity on our seated posture play a big role in the stiffness that occurs in our upper backs. Our thoracic spine should be mobile and often gets very stiff. Do you notice that your shoulders rest in a forward position? Over time, your mid back will become stiff and naturally rest in a flexed posture.
Weakness in the deep segmental muscles of your spine
The deepest muscles in our backs provide our back with stability between each segment. When not activated and used, these muscles can become dormant. The larger muscles, which are in charge of moving your back in large ranges of motion, will take over. When this happens, you can experience pain because the joint is not getting the stability it requires.
While this is far from an exhaustive list, it shows that there are many contributing factors, most of which are easily corrected.
Do you see what all of these have in common? None of the examples are due to a problem the low back itself. Instead, a problem elsewhere in the body often leads to low back pain.
Preventive movement screens are not just for athletes, they are for everyone. We all need to move through our daily tasks efficiently and effectively. These types of screens can provide valuable information that can be used to develop a home exercise program, which can address any hidden impairments and keep you ahead of the pain.
