Happy Holidays from the whole crew here at Dynamic Sports Physical Therapy!
We know this time of year can be busy, so we like to recommend things that give you the most bang for your buck. There is a tool we use here at DSPT that does that for us. It allows us to focus on the fundamentals and helps keep our treatments functional and holistic.
The Selective Functional Movement Assessment, or SFMA, is a comprehensive assessment tool we use to classify movement patterns, identify regions for further examination, and direct manual therapy and therapeutic exercise. Medical intervention and management are often focused on the source of a person's pain or complaint. If your back hurts, we examine your back. But what happens when the source isn't the cause of the issue? When you come in to see us, we look at how you move your entire body.
The SFMA is based on three main concepts:
- Regional interdependence – the idea that seemingly unrelated impairments in one area of the body may contribute or be associated with the primary complaint of the patient.
- Altered motor control – motor control is the ability to regulate muscles, joints, etc. that are essential to movement. Injury can and will alter this regulation and change how a patient moves.
- Neurodevelopmental sequence – movements develop in patterns and not in individual muscles. If something is missing from the sequence, applying an appropriate intervention that taps into the sequence can improve the acquisition of the missing element.
Let's say a patient comes in to see us about their lower back pain. Before we run a full evaluation of their back, we use the SFMA. Some dysfunction is seen stemming from their ankle. The patient confirms a history of recurrent ankle sprains. With ankle sprains, the stabilizing musculature of the hip can become dysfunctional and alter function in the lower back. The source is the low back, but the cause is the history of sprains. With this knowledge we are more effectively able to diagnose and treat the issue.
We hope you all stay safe and healthy this holiday season, and from all of us here at DSPT we wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!
