Over the weekend of 11thFebruary I was in London to do Kinetic Control’s “The Performance Matrix” movement screening course. I had been meaning to write this last week when I got home on Wednesday but the rest of the week was a bit hectic and I didn’t get the chance. First off it was a great course, well run by Mark Comerford and his team, and we all left, well I certainly did, feeling very enthusiastic about what I had learned, a good sign form with regards to the quality of any course I’ve been on.
The screen is used by many professional sporting bodies and is widely used by teams in the English Premier League. The idea behind the course is not to try and predict the chances of injury, Mark himself said this very early on, as there is no evidence to suggest that any screening process can do this. Nor is it an indicator of performance, many sportsmen and women can perform very well even when injured. In fact the most reliable predictor of re-injury is your previous history of injury. What it does set out to do is identify those areas that may be potential weak links where there are altered control strategies in terms of the site and direction of uncontrolled movement within a chain of linked events. That is to say we are attempting to control the movement with the wrong muscles either in low or high threshold movements. Having identified these areas, such as lack of control of lumbar flexion under low load, low threshold, or high load, high threshold, movements a suitable plan of action can be can be implemented to correct this.
I will be offering The Performance Matrix screen from the beginning of March as part of a package. The program will be a 2 month series and consist of the initial screen a number of treatment sessions, an exercise program which will be re-evaluated every 7-10days and a re-screen at the end of the 8 weeks
