What’s Your Functional Diagnosis?

By Coach Elise Perez

What’s Your Functional Diagnosis? 

A functional diagnosis is essentially your story as an athlete and how different components of your story will affect your training needs. 

Here are the different components that tell your story: 

Quality of movement and overall strength. How do you move, are you affected by limited ranges of motion, pain or injury? Where are you at with strength and do you have any strength imbalances? Having a qualified professional take you through movement screens and strength assessments will produce important findings to add to your story. 

Sleep, diet and stress habits. This information is so often overlooked. Understanding these habits are crucial to understanding what your recovery rate is like and what is affecting that recovery rate. How recovered you are will determine how much and how hard you’re able to work.

Goals. What are you working towards and hoping to accomplish through your training and habit building? 

Your skill level. Are you a beginner, intermediate, advanced or competitive athlete? Knowing where you are at will allow you to dose yourself appropriately when it comes to your training. 

Now that we’ve built your functional diagnosis, let’s find the Exercise Prescription. 

With exercise prescription, the solution must meet the problem. For example, if you have a shoulder mobility issue, you want to perform exercises that will get you stronger in new ranges of motion, not be hanging out with your arm inside of a band for hours hoping to stretch the problem away. 

Any exercise can correct something, which is what the exercise prescription aims to do. Not sure where to start with all of this? Look back at your story. Where is the lowest hanging fruit? What seems to constantly come up for you as an obstacle in how you feel and move? Start there.

Use the following template to tell us what your functional diagnosis is and we’ll tell you how we can help! 

My injuries/limitations: 

Rate your sleep, diet and stress on a scale of 1-5 (1 = terrible, 5 = amazing):

I feel strongest with/I feel weakest with:

My specific goals are:

I have been training for x amount of time: