Saturday, March 14, 2009

Postural Screening?

I can't emphasise this enough when it comes to this postural screening stuff- asymmetry is the norm. There is no simple algorithm; A+B does not always equal C. A few years back Vern Gambetta was lashed at in his blog when he suggested "pronator distortion syndrome" or "upper crossed syndrome" often disappeared when you moved from the static to dynamic/functional. Even suggesting he could not be a good strength coach without paying $400 bucks for a popular postural course.
Vern humbly dropped it, but he had the research behind him. In 2005 Lewis et.al in the journal of shoulder & elbow surgery came to the same conclusion with regard to shoulder injury in throwers. More recently, that same postural screening program was found to be a poor predictor of running injuries (don't have it handy, will have to dig it up).
Anecdotally, I've even seen the opposite! In other words, an athlete who has good ROM in a particular joint statically, but does not have the mostibility to present it dynamically.

3 comments:

Ryan Maloney said...

Are there any books/literature where one could learn more about dynamic posture? Most of what I've read makes the assumption that static posture translates to dynamic posture.

Joe Przytula said...

I like Gary Gray's, "Total Body Functional Profile". Cheap. If you understand the biomechanics of your sport, you pick & choose your own tests.

Kelvin Giles is doing some cool innovative stuff down under in Australia. His website is movementdynamics.com

Ryan Maloney said...

I'll check them out. Thanks Joe.