Athletes end up rehearsing the mobility screen

Give a squad a movement test twice a year and they will get better at the test, not the sport.

Six weeks into a mobility block the scores improve, the physio is pleased, and the squad squats through the same restricted range they did in August. This happens often enough that I no longer treat it as a surprise.

The mechanism is boring and human. A screen is a scored task. Score anything and people practise it, especially athletes, who have spent their whole lives being ranked. Nobody sets out to cheat. They just discover, without ever articulating it, which warm up drills happen to sit in the exact position the test measures, and those drills get done properly while the rest get done at half attention.

So the coaching error is not the screen. The screen is fine. The error is what gets prescribed off the back of it, which is almost always a set of floor based positions performed slowly, in isolation, at the start of a session that the athlete considers the boring part before the real work.

Range that exists lying on a mat at seven in the morning does not follow you into a change of direction at full speed. There is no reason it should. The nervous system did not learn to allow that range while accelerating, decelerating, holding an opponent off or reaching for a ball above the head. It learned it in the one narrow, calm, unloaded circumstance where you asked for it.

If you want the range to transfer, you have to put it where the sport keeps it. Load the end position. Put a decision in front of it. Make the athlete get there while somebody is moving towards them. A lunge held at depth with a rotation and a catch is a different animal to the same lunge held with the eyes on the floor, and only one of them looks anything like the sport.

The other thing worth saying is that some restrictions are not restrictions. They are the shape of a career. A thrower who has spent twelve years building an asymmetry through one shoulder is not a broken symmetric athlete waiting to be corrected, and coaching them back towards a neutral score can take away the thing they earn a living from.

Test twice a year if you want a number for the file. Coach the range in the positions the game actually uses, or accept that you are training people to pass an assessment.