The Hip & Pelvis: The Cornerstone of Movement Analysis

This post was written by Steven Dischiavi, MPT, DPT, ATC, COMT, CSCS, who teaches the course Biomechanical Assessment of the Hip and Pelvis. You can catch Steve teaching this course in May at Duke University in Durham, NC.

One thing that jumps out at me when treating a professional athlete, is that they have “a guy or gal” for everything! Most high profile athletes have a physical therapist, athletic trainer, acupuncturist, nutritionist, massage therapist, personal trainers for speed, power, cross fit, and pretty much “a guy or gal” for anything that has something to do with athletic performance or injury prevention. In most recent years I have been hearing more and more that athletes use someone that can analyze their movement and develop corrective exercises for them. These professionals are not just physical therapists, but some are personal trainers, exercise physiologists, chiropractors, and so on…

This has clearly been leading to a paradigm shift in not only evaluation of the athlete, but more specifically how we treat our athletes and clients. The Functional Movement Assessment is a tool that is gaining more and more popularity. It identifies “movement dysfunction” and then sets out to manage these movement patterns. I am a firm believer in functional movement assessment, and I believe it does need a larger role in our profession…I believe this so strongly I have recently changed gears professionally and have accepted an assistant professor position on the Physical Therapy faculty at High Point University. I want to affect change from within!

That said this is a very slippery slope right now in our profession. There are many people that believe that functional assessment is necessary. These same people cannot agree on the best way to do this and the there is a paucity of evidence to support a specific method at this time. This has driven me to continue to push the envelope in how to assess human movement and what is the cornerstone of this philosophy. I think the cornerstone is the hip and pelvis. I know this is somewhat broad, but after working professional hockey for 10 years I saw first hand what the hip and pelvis brings to the table. This led me to integrate this cornerstone into all facets of my treatments with all types of clients, young, old, big, small, athletic human, non-athletic humans! It was a quantum leap when the evidence caught up to practice and we stopped taping the patella because we were able to wrap our heads around the fact that it’s the track moving under the train! This momentum continues, because I am in a state of the art biomechanics lab everyday watching and learning how we can extrapolate these concepts and continue to move forward and advance movement theory. This has also allowed me to see that there is still a need about how we treat movement dysfunction. Which has led me to continue to work on the concept of the Dynamic Integration of the Myofascial Sling Systems!

If you attend this course I think you will look at human movement a little differently. I think you’ll enjoy the creative ways we can activate particular muscle chains to integrate and coordinate complex movements with more efficiency.

Yes, Herman & Wallace traditionally focuses on the women’s health practitioner. This course gives women’s health practitioners more treatment options to go with their unbelievable manual therapy skill set. This course offers many therapeutic exercise options that can help control the neurologic changes they are creating with their clients. Past course participants from the women’s health arena have continuously commented that they have gained a new tool in their toolbox to address movement imbalances and a way to integrate more function into their exercise programs. The sports and ortho PT will really enjoy this course. It will challenge some of their current paradigms and stir up some lively conversation on functional movement assessment and how to treat movement dysfunction when identified. Sports/ortho PTs consistently report how refreshing it is to consider new things in the profession. These PTs will leave this course challenging some of the traditional approaches they have taken. The reports back to me are usually that the sports/ortho PTs have had fun at this course and look forward to trying what they have learned and performed in lab sessions and applying it with their clients. I look forward to having you in class and having some fun and trying a lot of new exercises and discussing how the assessment of human movement and how identifying movement dysfunction is the direction things are going. William Blake once said “what is now proven, was once only imagined!” I don’t think movement analysis is quite proven yet, but we’re definitely applying science to the art of practice!