Musculoskeletal
Functional movement screening approaches to identify athletes at risk for musculoskeletal injuries and guide prevention.
This evergreen overview explains how functional movement screening helps practitioners spot risk factors, tailor preventive programs, and support athletes across sports, ages, and performance levels by emphasizing practical assessment, interpretation, and implementation.
July 29, 2025 - 3 min Read
Functional movement screening (FMS) represents a practical framework for assessing how athletes move rather than merely counting injuries or documenting performance metrics. By observing fundamental patterns like squatting, lunge mechanics, hip mobility, and rotational control, clinicians can detect asymmetries and weaknesses that predispose to tissue overload. The approach prioritizes quality of movement over quantity, acknowledging that suboptimal patterns may emerge from tight muscles, joint restrictions, motor control deficits, or previous injuries. With standardized scoring and repeatable tests, practitioners can track changes over time, identify intervention targets, and guide individualized progression. In this way, FMS serves as a bridge between screening and targeted prevention.
The core idea behind functional movement screening is not to label an athlete as fragile, but to illuminate how their movement system responds to demands. A clean score in isolation carries little meaning without context; therefore coaches pair FMS data with training history, workload, and sport-specific tasks. High-risk patterns often involve multi-segment coordination, where a limitation in ankle dorsiflexion, knee valgus, or thoracic mobility disrupts the kinetic chain. By documenting where movement breaks down, clinicians can tailor corrective strategies that address mobility, stability, and neuromuscular timing. The result is a proactive approach that emphasizes prevention as an integral part of athletic development, not an afterthought.
Using movement data to shape individualized injury prevention plans.
A robust FMS protocol integrates several standardized tests that collectively illuminate how well an athlete performs fundamental tasks. Each assessment is chosen for its relevance to common injury mechanisms, such as anterior knee stress, lumbar spine strain, or shoulder impingement. Practitioners look for symmetrical performance, controlled velocity, and stable trunk alignment during dynamic tasks. Beyond numerical scores, qualitative observations reveal compensatory patterns like early pelvis tilting or rib cage collapse, which signal potential sites of vulnerability. When interpreted together, these findings guide a multi-faceted plan that blends mobility work, kinetic chain integration, and sport-specific drills to reduce stress on vulnerable tissues.
Implementing a screening program requires careful consideration of practicality and ethics. Clinicians must ensure assessments are age-appropriate, non-invasive, and conducted with informed consent. Data privacy and clear communication with athletes and guardians are essential, particularly as screening results can influence early training decisions. Programs should be designed to minimize disruption to regular practice while maximizing learning opportunities. Re-assessment schedules, ideally every four to eight weeks, help teams gauge progress and adjust interventions. Importantly, the interpretation of FMS findings should be collaborative, incorporating input from physicians, coaches, physical therapists, and the athletes themselves to align prevention goals with performance priorities.
Integrating education and ongoing evaluation for durable outcomes.
When FMS results reveal a deficit, the first step is to separate mobility from stability issues. For mobility limitations, targeted stretching, myofascial release, and joint mobilizations can restore range of motion. Recovery protocols should accompany these interventions to prevent relapse and ensure sustainable gains. For stability and motor control deficits, progressive neuromuscular training is key. Exercises that challenge balance, proprioception, and controlled deceleration help re-educate the nervous system to recruit the correct muscles at the right times. A well-rounded plan also considers fatigue management and load progression to ensure improvements translate to actual sport demands.
In practice, successful screening blends clinician expertise with athlete engagement. Coaches and therapists must communicate findings in accessible language, framing results as a shared roadmap rather than a verdict. Athletes who understand the rationale behind exercises are more likely to commit fully to corrective programs. Periodic re-evaluation verifies whether interventions produce meaningful change in movement quality and injury risk. Importantly, FMS should not replace sport-specific conditioning; rather, it should complement it by ensuring the foundational movement patterns support higher-intensity tasks without compromising safety.
Balancing universal fragility indicators with individual variability.
A forward-looking screening program aligns with injury surveillance data and individual athlete goals. By monitoring patterns over time, practitioners can detect emerging risk profiles, such as progressive asymmetries or compensatory strategies that arise with growth or workload spikes. This proactive stance supports timely intervention, reducing the likelihood of sudden overuse injuries or acute episodes. Integrating FMS with return-to-play protocols also helps ensure athletes regain normal movement patterns after injuries, minimizing the chance of re-injury. The overarching aim is to cultivate movement literacy, enabling athletes to move efficiently and safely across training cycles.
The sport-specific relevance of FMS remains a central consideration. Different disciplines place unique demands on the body, so screening batteries should reflect those realities. For example, field sports often emphasize plyometrics and unilateral loading, while aquatic sports stress shoulder stability and core integrity. Tailoring tests to reflect typical loading patterns improves predictive value and engagement. Yet, universal components—hip hinge mechanics, scapular control, and core stability—often emerge as foundational contributors to resilience across sports. Emphasizing these shared elements helps create scalable prevention programs that athletes can carry into seasons and career phases.
The lasting value of movement screening in athletic development.
A key strength of functional movement screening lies in its adaptability. Teams can start with a core set of tests and expand as experience grows, ensuring the process remains efficient without sacrificing depth. The scoring framework should be transparent and reliable, with clear criteria and documented deviations. Clinicians also calibrate their judgments against normative data and ergonomic benchmarks to contextualize performance. Regular quality checks, including inter-rater reliability and periodic protocol updates, maintain consistency. Finally, stakeholders should track both movement quality and injury outcomes to validate the screening program’s effectiveness in real-world settings.
Integrating movement screening into a broader prevention ecosystem maximizes impact. Nutrition, sleep, stress management, and workload monitoring all influence how well movement patterns hold under load. By coordinating with medical staff, strength and conditioning coaches, and athletic trainers, teams create a holistic strategy that supports durability. Education sessions for athletes and families build a shared vocabulary around injury risk and prevention. When movement quality improves alongside performance, athletes experience fewer disruptions and longer, more sustainable careers, reinforcing the value of early screening as a core pillar of athletic development.
The ultimate promise of functional movement screening is not a perfect score but a dynamic awareness of the body in action. By identifying limits, guiding targeted interventions, and tracking transformation over time, FMS supports safer participation and steady performance gains. The approach emphasizes practical, repeatable steps that coaches can embed within standard training cycles, reducing the gap between assessment and action. As athletes progress, their movement becomes more efficient, injuries become less frequent, and confidence grows in the ability to handle diverse training stresses without compromising health.
For clinicians and practitioners, the ongoing challenge is to keep screening relevant, accessible, and respectful of individual differences. Continuous education, evidence-informed updates, and feedback loops with athletes ensure that the process remains patient-centered and outcome-driven. By prioritizing movement literacy and proactive prevention, sports programs can cultivate resilient athletes who thrive across seasons. The enduring value of functional movement screening lies in its capacity to translate observation into meaningful change, making prevention an integral, natural part of athletic culture.
