Gray Cook Movement book

Product Description

Functional Movement Systems: Functional movement screen, Movement assessments, Corrective exercise, Movement patterns, Movement screening

by Gray Cook
with Lee Burton, Kyle Kiesel, Greg Rose & Milo Bryant

The complete system you need to enhance movement and reduce injury risk

Click here to order the paperback edition from Amazon.

Clinicians, coaches and trainers all share the same goal: getting the human body to function at its peak with minimum risk of injury.

Yet, two major problems often hold these professions back from achieving this shared goal.

Problem #1: Not taking into account an individual’s quality of movement

Healthcare and fitness practitioners often neglect fundamental movement, paying too much attention to the surface view.

A surgeon, a physician and a physical therapist see problems through eyes biased by their training. One sees a surgical solution based on structure; one considers which medication to manage pain and inflammation, while the other looks for mechanical issues to rehabilitate.

Coaches and trainers, on the other hand, often focus on fitness and performance without first screening for movement dysfunctions that might cause movement compromises or predispositions to injury.

Across these professions, fundamental movement often isn’t brought into the conversation on the same level as other issues that are qualified and quantified in exercise and rehabilitation.

This leaves people open to risk of injury, pain and performance inefficiencies that could otherwise be avoided.

Problem #2: Not having a common language to communicate with each other

Coaches, trainers and clinicians have different skillsets, different areas of expertise, and different educational backgrounds. But because they treat the same clients, they must be able to effectively communicate with each other.

In the absence of a common language, these different professions often speak past each other to the detriment of the client.

If you’re a trainer, strength coach, physical therapist, or chiropractor whose clients trust to get them performing at their best, you need to have a system for evaluating and improving movement quality and a language to communicate with other professionals in.

In Movement, Gray outlines the movement system that is aimed at solving these problems. A system that is now being used across the world in NFL teams, NHL teams, the military, universities, and countless other clinics and training centers.

This system gives you a standard operating procedure and common language for movement-pattern screening, assessment and correction in fitness and rehabilitation. It will allow you to better identify potential risks and create better rehabilitation and exercise programs based on each individual’s unique movement profile.

“Exercise and rehabilitation time is valuable—too valuable not to use a system.
Gray Cook’s Movement uses a systematic approach to exercise and rehabilitation built on the fundamentals of authentic human movement.”

~ Peyton Manning, Indianapolis Colts

If you’ve ever wanted to:

• understand why people get injured, and why their pain keeps returning
• improve your patient’s recovery process
• give people a strong foundation before loading them with weights
• eliminate training mistakes that delay results
• improve your client’s chances of making it through the athletic season without suffering a non-contact injury
• restore the quality life in people who have suffered in pain for years due to movement problems
• build more functional, longer lasting athletes
• avoid frustrations and improve patient outcomes when working with other healthcare and fitness professionals by learning a standardized language to communicate in

… then Gray’s Functional Movement System outlined in Movement may be just what you need.

Movement is like the college course in the ‘missing piece’ of the performance and rehabilitation puzzle you never learned in school.

“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’s Supertraining. In the 2000s McGill’s Ultimate Back. Enter the 2010s and Gray Cook’s Movement. It is a game-changer.”

~ Pavel Tsatsouline, author of Enter the Kettlebell!

“Gray Cook has the ability and charisma to reach any audience. A WhizKid PT, Gray has singlehandedly changed coaching in every professional sport.

Because of Gray, the Functional Movement Screen is now the gold standard screening tool in our industry.”

~ Michael Boyle, author of Advances in Functional Training

Topics Covered in Movement

Understanding Human Movement

You will learn how to use screening, testing and assessment to classify movement proficiency or deficiency. You’ll also learn the differences between the two systems, the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) and the Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA).

Screening Movement

Where in your intake process should you screen? Can you screen an injured client or athlete? Movement will show you where to place movement screening in your existing business model, and where your program structure might be improved.

Functional Movement Systems and Movement Patterns

What is the FMS? And how is it different from the SFMA? In Movement, you’ll learn about both the systems, and will finish with an appreciation of primitive and higher-level movement patterns.

The Functional Movement Screen (FMS)

You’ll learn in detail the seven basic screens that make up the FMS, including where to stand during screening, what to watch for during the movements and how to plan your modifications. You’ll get a description of each screen, the purpose of each, tips for testing, possible causes of issues and photographs showing how to score each test.

You’ll also learn how to modify the movement screen for special populations such as the morbidly obese, seniors and those with medical restrictions.

Analyzing Movements in Screens and Assessments

You’ll learn how to analyze the various test results. Using the tests of the Functional Movement Screen as the base, you’ll discover what mistakes most beginners make in screening, how to distinguish between stability and mobility problems, and how to determine asymmetries. Here you’ll also get your first introduction to reverse patterning (RP) and reactive neuromuscular training (RNT), two of the primary corrective tools of the Functional Movement Systems arsenal.

Understanding Corrective Strategies

What do you do with the resulting screen and assessment information? You’ll learn about the performance pyramid and how to use it to form corrective strategies. Understanding the differences between correct and corrective exercises, between challenging versus difficult, and having a selection of self-limiting exercises in your exercise menu will give you confidence as you assign and program exercises.

Developing Corrective Strategies

Now that you’ve discovered dysfunctional patterns in your clients, athletes and patients, learn how to develop the right corrective strategies with the help of the three primary categories of mobility, stability and movement-pattern retraining. You’ll get comparisons of conditioning and corrective exercise, movement prep and movement correction, skill training and corrective prioritization, and will understand when each is appropriate.

Building the Corrective Framework

You’ll get a six-item checklist for your corrective decisions. Even though every person’s movement is unique, with this framework, your corrective path will be clearer. You’ll also become familiar with the basic structure involving special considerations and populations that may make up part of your client or patient base.

Movement Pattern Corrections

Build on your knowledge of basic mobility and stability corrections and movement-pattern retraining. Using passive, active and assistive techniques, you’ll be able to help your clients, athletes and patients recover lost mobility. Learn about stability and motor control, transitional postures and how to use facilitation techniques such as reactive neuromuscular training to challenge newfound mobility.

Advanced Corrective Strategies

Learn how to make corrective exercise an experience. This is how corrective exercise actually works in the human body, and the thorough discussion found in this chapter will teach you how to create this for your clientele. Using PNF, RNT, reverse patterning, conscious loading, resisted and self-limiting exercises, you’ll grasp the concept of the manageable mistake zone, and you’ll be able to use these ideas and techniques to stand out in your crowded professional field.

SFMA Introduction and Top-Tier Tests

Learn about the top-tier assessments of the SFMA, including the overlying considerations of functional versus dysfunctional and painful versus non-painful, the overriding criteria of the SFMA system.

SFMA Assessment Breakout Descriptions and Flowcharts

The SFMA breakouts are covered in detail over 58 pages and 66 photographs inside Movement.

Introduction to Screening and Assessment

Understand the purpose of screening movement and learn how to recognize movement patterns in action.

“Gray’s premise is beautiful in its simplicity: Training movement can fix muscles, but training muscles rarely fixes movement. Since all of sport is movement, his 80/20 approach is then astounding in its effectiveness.

For the time invested, the FMS and its cousins are the best tools I’ve seen for producing bullet-proof athletes and pain-free non-athletes in record time.”

~ Tim Ferriss, author of the #1 NY Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek

Get Your Copy Today

If you’re looking for the missing puzzle piece to help protect your clients from future injury and to eliminate the roadblocks that hold them back from greater performance, you’ll find Gray Cook’s Functional Movement System as detailed inside the Movement book invaluable.

Inside you’ll discover a system that not only helps you screen and assess an individual’s movement quality, but also a system that helps you identify the corrective strategies they need to help protect from injury and to move better.

In addition to Movement, you’ll also get these exclusive On Target Publications bonuses—

• Gray Cook: Movement Principles—a 7-page PDF transcript
• Gray Cook: Reconsidering the Way We Look at Movement (a lecture given at the VCU School of Medicine)— 30-page PDF transcript (a $9.95 value)
• Gray Cook: Reactive Neuromuscular Training—a 60-minute MP3 audio recording, accompanied by a 12-page PDF transcript and three PDF book excerpts

“Gray Cook has changed things. You might not know it, but things are different now. I’ve been in sports since LBJ was in office, and I’ve been wondering something for a long time: What’s wrong? Yep, that’s it. Why does this hurt when I do that? How come I can’t just do X? Gray has the answer in his new book, Movement.

“Right from the start, he tells me what I’ve been doing wrong for way too long: First move well, and then move often. His performance pyramid alone is worth the time and energy to read the book. But my favorite part of the text is idea of self-limiting activities.

“It’s not a cure-all section, but, for me, it was a blueprint to think about exercise in a whole new light: something that actually moves while working on the quality of movement. If you understand what I wrote, bless you. Otherwise, read the section!

“I keep expanding my ‘must have’ Library. Tommy Kono’s book? Check. Keys to Progress? Check. Boyle’s new book? Check. Cerutty on Training? Check. Power to the People and Return of the Kettlebell? Check and check. New Cook’s new book.

Push your bookends out a little wider. It’s a keeper.”

~ Dan John, author of Never Let Go