My Education- Functional Range Assessment

This fall I took my second installment our courses in the Functional Range Systems. After being jazzed on all of the information I learned last year taking the FRC I was excited to learn more.

Taking the FRC course taught me a lot of nuts and bolts of training true mobility. I learned significant detail about articulations, their make up, and the stressors needed to make change within them.

Practicing the system had shown significant results with different clients, but I have to admit that I didn’t feel 100% confident implementing all of it. All of our clients are individuals with their own histories, interests, injuries, etc. . .  I felt as if I didn’t know enough. It was as if I had this entire toolbox of tools but I didn’t really know how to use them. I felt as if I was guessing once I stepped outside of the simple interventions.

These details as well as an interest in becoming more clinical in my career led to me to take the Functional Range Assessment course (FRA). FRA is the system that takes the guesswork out of programming. Hours of lecture before the practical weekend taught us about Systems Thinking, removing subjectivity, and learning biases of our own interpretations. The lecturing clinicians made the process seem so simple. It revitalized my confidence in the system by knowing that you just need to follow the flow chart. No guessing!


After hours of lectures, it was time for the practical weekend which was two 5-hour days of lecture and “hands on” experience. Because it was taken virtually it wasn’t really “hands on” but instead it was watching the “hands on” elements. This is a bit of a shame, but even if it was in person, I don’t think there would have been enough time for everyone to practice as we went. There is just too much information to squeeze into one weekend.
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Let’s regress for a moment. The FRA is largely a two part process. First are the table tests. Table tests are what you may have had done at physical therapy where the clinician passively takes your joint through a range of motion. For example, they may lift your leg and observe how it can passively move in all directions and rotate. While they do this, they’re measuring passive range of motion and looking for any pains or obstructions. After that the clinician measures your passive range of motion where you try to repeat the same moments via your own muscular control. In a perfect world, you can actively move as far as you can be passively moved.


The second part of the FRA is an observable CARs assessment. CARs are Controlled Articular Rotations which are an expression of your ability to use the largest range of motion possible by a joint. This is beyond the active abilities shown in the table tests because it encompasses the entire spectrum of range rather than the micro-view we take in the table tests. This is more familiar to me as we had been running a modified CARs analysis at The Body Architect for a couple of years.


By using these two systems (table tests and CARs) once can observe where the clients is missing ranges of motion and determine what exercises can help restore their shortcomings. Superficially this seems quite easy, but it became apparent to me at the end of the second day that we had barely scratched the surface.


While it may be easy enough to observe ranges, WHY the articulation is acting the way it is, is more difficult to interpret. Let me explain. Within FRS joint rotation is king. Joints must rotate to do what they need to do. They must rotate internally and externally. The FRA shows us what is limited and the FRC principles can restore the limited area. Seems simple, but the caveat is that different tissues with different issues require different inputs. For non-manual therapists it is difficult to determine what tissues are limiting the articulations range of motion. Tight muscles vs. tight capsules vs. neural control all require different inputs, but as a trainer I don’t know how or have the scope the assess that.


This was my frustration from the course. I feel as if I have more questions after taking the course than I did when I started. I felt the same way after taking the first installment too. Here I am again with these great tools, but I don’t really know how to use them in full confidence.


That’s not to say that I didn’t learn a lot from the weekend or I cannot implement things I learned. In fact, I can implement a lot of it. My hangup is, that without having knowledge of tissues and injuries, objectivity promised by the system is lessened. If a client has an observed limitations, we can certainly try different inputs and if they work, they work and if they don’t, they don’t. If I had the knowledge of a skilled manual therapist, this guesswork could be taken out all together.


I absolutely learned a ton this weekend. It opened my eyes to objective assessments and taught me what to really look for. My interests have peaked even more. I’m more excited to learn about the human body. It has become more fascinating and complex to me. Exciting and daunting.