This is Brent of the Brookbush Institute, and in this video I wanted to show you a quick hack for
reducing the overhead squat assessment to just upper-body signs, and perhaps
increasing the reliability of our upper body movement assessment. I'm going to have
my friend a Yvette come out, she's going to help me demonstrate. Now if Yvette's done
this assessment before, what we're going to do is start against a wall. So head
against the wall, back against the wall and butt against the wall, feet just have
to be relatively close to the wall they don't have to be all the way up against
the wall. Now going through my overhead squat
assessment science I know that if somebody can't keep their arms in line
with their body that would be arms fall, and a sign. If we have scapular
elevation that's a sign, an excessive lordosis increase in lordosis or
anterior pelvic tilt can be an upper-body sign, because the latissimus
dorsi with their propensity to get overactive can actually pull on the
posterior iliac spine and turn us into an anterior pelvic tilt or increase our
lumbar lordosis; and then the last sign we could relate back to
upper-body and cervical dysfunction is forward head. So going back through those
four signs, forward head, arms you'll see you can't get against the wall,
scapular elevation or excessive lordosis become really easy to see when we put
somebody against a nice flat wall, that gives us a hundred and eighty degree
reference. Okay and so all I'm going to have Yvette do is now that she's back against
the wall, hey can you lock your elbows for me, and then I'm going to have you keep
your arms right next to your ears essentially and go all the way back up
to the wall see if you can get the back of your hands to the wall.
You can see already that Yvette can't do that.
Now keep in mind you are going to want two views on this, so I'm going to
want a lateral view and a front-on view. So we both kind of have the
lateral view here, and the lateral view you can tell her arms can't get all
the way back to the wall. She's maintained good contact with the
back of her head to the wall, and this lordosis didn't seem to
increase. We can do this one more time, all right and so you can even put your
hand there if you want, just make sure your your clients know what you're
up to, and her lordosis didn't increase at all. So what I'm thinking from the
side view right now is okay her arms fell, that's it, of my four signs we just
have arms fall. Now I would then go to my front view ask her to do it again, and
from the front view I might see those elbows bend. I'm going to show you this
in a second here, and I also noticed that she had some elevation of her scapula,
her shoulders kind of crept up this way. So with the Yvette of my four
signs being forward head, arms fall, scapular elevation, excessive lordosis,
she has arms fall and scapular elevation. I'm going to go ahead and have you face the
camera now. So pretend there's a wall behind her, remember in this view what
you're really looking at is do her elbows bend, and does she have scapular
elevation. Alright go ahead and go up, alright and you can see how
this starts to come up and she likes to bend her elbows when she gets up there,
and of course that's just a cheat for the lack of flexion in her shoulder
complex. So let's try that one more time so they can see, good great. Alright let's
go ahead and have you turned back to the wall. Now you can imagine this is a
really easy test to do and something I can keep reassessing, and rather doing
the whole overhead squat assessment, as you can imagine if somebody came in with
like shoulder impingement syndrome having them do a squat doesn't
necessarily help. Now some of my movement geeks out there you might be able to
explain to me how an asymmetrical weight shift will contribute to a loss of
shoulder flexion and how that can contribute to shoulder impingement
syndrome, but from a practical standpoint if somebody comes in with shoulder
impingement syndrome they have something wrong with their upper-body that needs
to be treated out first before you go down to this asymmetrical
weight shift, keep that stuff in mind. Alright but if I was working with Yvette and
she had shoulder impingement syndrome,
I noticed arms fall, well great now I have a retest to keep coming back to.
I can do some stuff go okay let's see if that got better. All right so go
ahead and do it again, that didn't get better. Does that happen during treatment?
Absolutely, what did I learn? Well I learned that whatever I just did, maybe
we don't need to do again because it didn't seem to work out. Of course if I
did something that did work I could make note and we could keep doing that to
keep seeing improvement. So there you have it, if you have anybody who
has just upper-body signs, you want to address just upper-body signs, you
could rather than doing the full-on overhead squat assessment do this upper
body only version. Or if you had somebody come in and they had an obvious upper-
body complaint, cervical pain like suprascapular complaints, they had
shoulder impingement syndrome right, these are reasons that maybe we don't
need the rest of the overhead squat assessment. We can come to this quick
assessment that we can do over that might be a little bit more reliable
because we have this hundred and eighty degree reference behind us, and it just
makes everything just that much better for making our assessments a little bit
more reliable. If you have any questions please leave them in the
bottom.