Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway played basketball for 14 seasons in the NBA, making the All-Star team 4 times and the All-NBA first team twice. He was a spectacular collegiate player for Memphis as well as being the star of one of the most underrated basketball movies of all time, “Blue Chips”.
He also had the worst performance on the FMS I’d ever seen in my life.
For those of you who are unfamiliar - and I truly hope that includes most of you - FMS stands for “Functional Movement Screen” and was a wildly popular tool to assess movement capabilities and limitations when I first got into serious training.
Developed by an extremely influential physical therapist named Gray Cook, the FMS became standard practice among dedicated personal trainers. Prior to a first actual training session, you would assemble this small kit that included a plastic plank, a couple of dowels labeled with numbers up the side and an elastic cord and put a new client through a series of seven different movements.
These tasks would test their ability to lunge, step, squat, extend, stabilize and internally and externally rotate and be scored on scale of 1-3 (a 0 was possible if any movement produced pain). The point of it all was to reveal what movement pattern deficiencies needed to be addressed and if a client was even ready for training at all.
It was not long after I had gone through the weekend-long FMS course that I found myself clumsily assembling the gym’s kit while Hardaway impatiently pretended to dribble and take jump shots with a non-existent basketball while he waited for me.
A perfect FMS score is a 21. I have seen two people in my career get twenties. One was a collegiate wrestler. The other was a semi professional dancer.
Anfernee Hardaway got a 5.
When the owner of the gym asked me to fill him in on the test results I jokingly told him that we should probably call an ambulance.
And while Hardaway certainly did not perform massive feats of strength or wow us with his range of motion (basketball players are so tall and limby that they very rarely excel at weight room activities) his subsequent training sessions went absolutely fine.
So what gives?
The correct answer in this case is also the obvious one. When it comes to strength training, pre-program assessments are fairly useless.
There’s a reason that you don’t really see the FMS being used any more.
A big caveat here. I am speaking exclusively about strength training. In the world of physical therapy and other medical interventions, assessments can prove to be very valuable. Those practitioners are addressing injury, pain and diagnosed dysfunction. So if you go to a physical therapist and they put you through a movement screen or table test please do not tell them that your buddy Dan said that this is bullshit.
In the gym, the truth is that the training is the assessment. This is why we’ve eliminated any type of pre-training screening. We just throw you into the fire, see how you move and make any and all adjustments from there.
And this is not just limited to your first session or first week of training. Every training session is an assessment. If it wasn’t, what would the point be of having a coach?
For sure there are certain baseline variables that are great to have - body composition stats or repetition maxes in the big lifts are simple ones that come immediately to mind. But even those are not critical to starting a training program.
Because the biggest barrier to beginning a training program isn’t assessing how much natural internal rotation you have in your left ankle as you step over an overly-priced rubber band precisely set up at mid-shin height or what 80% of your back squat is.
The biggest barrier to starting a training program is starting a training program.
Penny Hardaway eventually went back to his alma mater in 2018 to become head coach of the men’s basketball program. His team has won 20 games in every season he has coached and he led them to an NIT championship and several NCAA tournament appearances. He became minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies as well as starting a barber shop and turf business in Memphis. He married his high school sweetheart and actually coaches his oldest son at University of Memphis.
When it comes to training and life, I’m really happy to see that his FMS score hasn’t held him back.