Movement Book

Description

"Once a decade a book comes out that you will keep reading, rereading, and crowding with notes until it falls apart. Then you buy a new copy and enthusiastically start over. In the 1990s it was Verkhoshansky and Siff'sSupertraining. In the 2000s McGill's Ultimate Back. Enter the 2010s and Gray Cook's Movement. It is a game changer."

Pavel Tsatsouline

"We have integrated many of Gray Cook's movement principles and corrective strategies into our programs to help accomplish our mission of preserving and maintaining the Commander's combat power. The FMS screening and assessment tools are very useful in establishing the baseline for our performance training system."

Mike Strock, US NAVY, Human Performance Consultant

"I use the Functional Movement Screen in my work with training professional football players, and you can use it for your work with hearty athletes, personal training clients and rehabilitation patients as well. It's that versatile, that effective and that appealing...

Everything we do at the Indianapolis Colts is built on a Functional Movement Screen base—it's the foundation of our program"

Jon Torine, Strength and Conditioning Coach, Indianapolis Colts

Small children roll, squat, lunge, run and lift with instinctively perfect form. The human animal is a "natural born athlete" primed and encoded to move with effective grace as it engages with life.

However, life is a series of insults and challenges to the development and maintenance of quality movement. Inflicted trauma, poor habits and a host of other factors start to degrade the elemental patterns of human movement into an increasingly dysfunctional system.

According to Gray Cook, this dysfunction is primarily due to the existence of asymmetries and imbalances in the body. Survival-based compensations for these asymmetries and imbalances create a cascade of increasingly harmful micro-trauma that set the stage for a potentially devastating injury.

With brilliant insight, Gray Cook has identified seven primal patterns, which are the basis for all significant human movement. Cook has further developed a set of screens to identify the imbalances and asymmetries lurking within any one primal movement pattern.

Once these imbalances and asymmetries have been recognized, then appropriate corrective exercises can be prescribed to restore balance and symmetry. Once balance and symmetry are restored, the risk of injury plummets while the quality of movement soars.

These protocols for recognizing and addressing imbalance and asymmetry— through screening, assessment and corrective strategies—are known as FMS, or Functional Movement Systems.

Research with professional sports teams and with the US military, in particular, has now proved that the FMS—and its clinical sister SFMA (Selective Functional Movement Assessment)—indeed succeeds in dramatically reducing future injury, while enhancing or restoring lost performance.

Gray Cook's eagerly-awaited masterpiece, Movement, presents the complete functional movement system in all its glory. Movement is monumentally thorough, yet highly accessible. Fitness professionals of every kind and level will discover a treasure trove of performance-enhancing and injury-preventing protocols they can quickly implement for both themselves and their clients. Clinicians of every ilk will be delighted by the breadth and depth of the SFMA protocols, to enhance the therapeutic strategies they are currently using to heal patients.