What would be some economical and telling examples of tests that a coach or trainer can give a client to determine weakness in any area? What do youu use and do you do anything original?
I’m certainly not the person that you are trying to contact but I’ll try to put in a few cents.
Gray Cook has a book where he uses his Functional Movement Analysis. In that he notices movement imbalances and prescribes exercise progressions for them. It’s pretty decent.
Human Kinetics has a book out that is designed to test motor skill qualities and analyze movement. I can’t remember the name of it but to be honest, it didn’t look that good.
High-Performance Sports Conditioning is also a over-rated book by human kinetics, but it offers some baseline tests, they are all by Gray Cook also though, so I guess I may be pushing you in that direction. It may be general info though depending on what you are looking for. Still useful at some level though.
Thanks, I think Human Kinetics is usually about 10 years behind.
I will check out Gray.
What specifically is meant by the original poster when they stated, “determine weakness in any area” (ie. area of the body, ‘muscle’ weakness or ‘imbalance’, sporting movement, etc.)?
You could always just go for a maximum weights test (squat, bench press, row, power clean if they can do them competently, that sort of thing), 100m and 1500m if you’ve never met this person before; if you know them already then you probably know their weaknesses and they should accept your judgement without needing some specific test to prove it.
Or if you want to show off you could have them do a VO2max power test, max weights on five different weird exercises and one legged vertical leap with one arm shoved up their ass, but what will that sort of thing really tell you beyond what you get from the basic tests above?