Functional Assessment
Many of you will be familiar with the concept of functional training in rehabilitation, so a brief review of historical aspects will suffice here.
Functional training from a rehabilitation perspective has been used for many decades with the obvious goal of returning an individual to their pre-injury functional status. The astute reader will note that this implies a degree of individuality and specificity in rehabilitation strategies depending on the individual’s response to the injury in question and the planned functional goals to be achieved. In this discussion we are concerned with a return to playing sport, which has different functional requirements depending on the sport of choice. Most rehabilitation specialists would agree that the fundamental measure of success is the ability to “perform at maximal function”. The issues of debate usually centre around:
1. Whether to use functional exercise as an initial priority.
2. Whether to place prerequisite criteria for progressing to functional exercise e.g. base line flexibility measures, stability measures, agility, coordination and power.
3. The use of over load / external resistance to achieve progressive increases in power output.
4. Key variables to manipulate in exercise progression e.g. load, speed, plane of motion, movement sequence.